Il Cuore Altrove
by Swamy
Summary: "You know how long I've been waiting for you?" [post s.6, bamon]
1. Chapter 1

**Note:** Many of you have probably already noticed that I'm blocked with my writing, so today, after watching my second TVD episode since the beginning of the show, I jumped at the first sign of inspiration and wrote this. I had already the story in mind since before the end of season six but I had no clue as to how approach it. I hope it's good enough, let me know what you think. The song I used at the end of the chapter is "I will crumble" by Mike Vogel. The title of this story means " _The Heart Elsewhere_ ". As always, thanks to _Syeira Lei_ for her help, I'd be lost without her.

 **Four years from now.**

" _Alexander_ _Graham Bell, to_ _see_ _Miss_ _Marron,"_ Kevin Costner says on his TV screen before he can turn the thing off. The corner of Damon's mouth turns up into a grin and he lowers the hand holding the remote control, letting it rest on his thigh. The grave, dramatic voiceover announces that a bodyguard lives by three rules: never let your guard down, never let her out of your sight, never fall in love; and that the movie itself will air next Wednesday.

He can hear Bonnie's voice demanding that they watch it, though it's been barely two months since the last time they did. He knows most of the dialogue by heart, can tell exactly in which moments Bonnie will alternatively sigh, hold her breath, chew on her lower lip, let herself fall against the cushions of the sofa or the pillows of his king sized bed.

He had half-heartedly planned to go back to his coffin, to avoid once again the bother of living without Elena and the insult of seeing his best friend mingle with a regurgitation of the human kind like Enzo, but he supposes he can push back his plans.

He pushed them back three times already. The first time she got a flu so bad she wobbled on her knees every time she needed to move from her bedroom, so he thought that sticking around to nurse her and snap photos of her poor state to decorate her walls and tease her would be a nice gesture. The coffin and the perpetual sleep weren't going anywhere after all.

The second time she had a fight with Enzo two hours before he had decided to say his goodbye to the world, and he would have never passed up on the opportunity to spend a night insulting that asshole of friend that wasn't worth the scum under the sole of her shoes on his best day. Who could blame him for rescheduling his beauty sleep?

The third time he forgot he had to go back to the storehouse and his bedding of cherry wood and satin because Bonnie had picked a very horrid color to paint the walls with, and he'd be damned if he let her do that to her bedroom, which is right next to his.

Now Damon is as eager to skip on the Elena-less years that await him as ever, mind you, but since the air is impregnated with the sweet smell of dumping that dead weight that is Enzo, and _The Bodyguard_ is going to be on in five days he supposes there's no rush.

He turns his head to look at the pendulum clock and he sighs, bored. Bonnie is colossally late and he hopes it's due to the fact that she is busy getting rid of her shameful excuse for a boyfriend, otherwise he's going to be a very devoted pain in her ass all day long. He surely is not going to assemble her new closet without her doing her part, otherwise, before he knows he'll be painting her toenails for her; which would probably turn him on. And he definitely can't have that.

Bonnie is great, and generally having a best friend that smells always so damn nice and never burps is amazing, but there's the downside to it, too. He caught himself twice right before nibbling at her shoulder as he woke up in the middle of the night pressed against her back after they watched a movie – a conditioned response he blames on his alert body and her atrocious softness.

The smell of her shampoo and the way she curls her fingers around the sheets during a romantic scene does nothing to fight the boner that decides to punctually visit him. And when she's in a good mood and he touches her and her hugs linger for a few seconds longer than necessary his hands start to itch for the need to pin her down on the floor or press her up against the wall, and the whole point of having such a reliable, ever-present best friend to keep him faithful to his sleeping girlfriend gets screwed.

But Bonnie is his best friend, and he knows better than to confuse one kind of love with another. A kind of love that won't grant her his help with her new furniture if she doesn't show up in the next five minutes with a decent excuse for her delay and enough breath to flatter him for at least the next six hours.

Damon takes a beer from the fridge in his kitchen, stares at the half empty inside and lets it close so that he can look at the shopping list scribbled on the yellow post-it kept up by a witch's hat magnet. They need more beer, and they are almost out of that horrid Greek yogurt Bonnie likes so much. There's a pen abandoned on the table, the cap is lightly chewed which is a clear indication of its owner's identity, and of the fact that the trick of using bitter nail polish for children to cover it up and stop this nervous habit of hers is actually working; he jots down the items under the list, blue ink under a column in black.

Last week was Caroline's turn to go grocery shopping, which means this week it's his. He can drag Bonnie along by promising her a reward in ice-cream. There were times when the ice-cream had a more noble use, like covering a hot body to lick to his heart's content, but that was before. When he told his best friend she just rolled her eyes, luckily for him missing the unspoken invitation he was entirely not making. Because he really wasn't making any. Truly. _Cross my heart and hope to die_.

A little voice in the back of his head is doing a countdown for her to finally arrive and save him from lonely boredom when he hears the doorbell ring. His ears strain and he can hear a familiar heartbeat he doesn't indulge on before letting the smile curl his mouth. It's not been long since she started living with them, and sometimes Bonnie still forgets she's supposed to use her own key and when she remembers, it's too late, and she has already pressed down on the button outside their front door.

Damon shakes his head, leaving the beer bottle on the table before jogging to the door.

"You're in trouble, Missy…" he spells, knowing how she hates to be called such, like she's still a kid, making sure she hears him from the other side as he turns the doorknob, "You know how long I've been waiting for you?" he asks as the door opens to show him Elena's face.

Damon's smile freezes, his breath catches in his throat and his heart starts to beat frantically. His doe-eyed, supposedly deep in a magical coma, girlfriend is looking at him with a smile so big it almost splits her face in two.

"I hoped you were," she says, taking one step before launching herself in his arms. It feels amazing to have her in his arms, again, his brain tries to tell him. She makes a giggling sound while Damon slips his arms around her, holding her so tight he might accidentally break a bone.

She's happy and he's happy and for a moment everything is perfect.

Then his heart seems to sink in his stomach, bumping a few internal organs on the way down.

The dreading feeling seems to make his blood flow away and his eyes lower like he's looking for the sign of his bleeding on the doormat, rivulets of red to adorn the walkways with vivid squiggles. His arms lose strength and he can't make out the words she's saying, because his hearing is muffled like someone is holding his head underwater.

Elena is so alive and so happy and he should kiss her now but his chest is hollowing out, slowly and irremediably, though he can't understand why. _Why?_ He tries asking himself, forcing his lungs to move, grab air, keep it in, push it out. Suddenly breathing is like an alien process he can't master up. _Why_? He asks again. His thought are scattered, confused, he needs to peel the words off the cells of his brain and find the order in which they are supposed to be.

It seems an eternity but it's barely three fucking seconds. And he knows that Elena is alive, and therefore Bonnie is dead, and if he could think straight he'd know that he doesn't need to bother with her new closet anymore, and he should cross out the Greek yogurt from the shopping list, and he'd remember that he was really tired of that fucking movie anyway.

He'd remember to be happy now because Elena is finally back, if only he could think about anything else but the fact that Bonnie died and he never allowed her to go and do that.

#

 **Two months from the linking spell.**

He stares at her through the mirror in front of him. His fingertips trap the scotch glass on the counter as he traces with his eyes the faint green vein that travels along her long neck. He slowly moves the glass back and forth on the surface of the counter, listening intently to the scratching of its bottom on the lacquered wood that mixes up with the black girl's words and the music in the background.

Her voice is a little annoying but he is ready to keep an open mind with regard to her taste. The moment he'll sink his teeth into her jugular she won't be able to do much more then moan once, maybe more if he makes it good for her. But why should he make it good for her?

"I know what you're thinking," Bonnie says, making him blink to find her leaning against the counter, to his right.

Damon barely grunts, busies his mouth with a sip of the amber colored liquid in his glass. He doesn't bother to contradict her because she probably does know what he's thinking. Maybe a little part of him was actually counting on her knowing, on her stopping him, he realizes with a grin looking at the dry bottom of his, now empty, glass.

"But I don't see why you should settle for a look-alike."

That makes his eyes snap up and he turns to look at her. Bonnie is all soft curves, covered in honey skin and a smell that would make any other man spend his days with his nose buried in her hair, in the crook of her neck, in the sweet recess between her legs. She's looking at a particular table, and it takes him barely a peek to see that she's looking at the same girl he was aiming at.

It's strange how she doesn't look disgusted at the picture in her mind, how she knows him well enough to know and still not run in the opposite direction. Well, it is actually more surprising that he's not on his knees, trying to tear off his own head from his neck while she declaims her dear commandments on how to be a decent vampire with that persistence that makes her similar to a kicking mule.

Instead she presses her pretty lips into a thin line and shrugs.

"You think I want to kill you?" he asks, his voice so dripping with sarcasm he would have no trouble believing it himself.

"Don't you?" she asks, irking him so much he feels his gums itching and his tongue easily finds the canine sliding out. He turns again so he won't have to look at her, uses his finger to point at the empty glass which the waiter promptly fills.

He doesn't.

In the last two hours he thought about killing an asshole that had cut in front of his Camaro, he thought about killing Kai – again, he thought about killing that black girl with the long neck, he thought about killing himself to skip ahead to the moment Elena will open her eyes again. But he never, for any reason, contemplated the idea of killing her. Which is exactly why he's there, with a never-ending thirst he can't placate, getting irritated at his best friend for thinking that he could want her dead. Because what does it say about him that he can't do what he must to bring the love of his life back? Once, he would have jumped at the chance, and Bonnie's life would have been one drop in an ocean of blood he would happily bathe in.

Had he met a man that needed only to kill one single, insignificant person in order to have his happiness granted _forever_ he would have called him a coward, a spineless excuse for a man, with water in the place of blood, had that man barely hesitated. He would have thought the love he claimed to feel was empty and useless, because love is not a walk in the park. So now Damon deserves to be called a coward, a spineless excuse for a man, and probably no amount of blood to suck can make up for what he lacks, but whoever might call him that, they obviously never met Bonnie, or they would know why he can't lose her. Even if sometimes he misses Elena so much he wants to crash his head into the nearest wall, he just can't.

"Wanna make a toast?" Bonnie asks, stealing his glass from his loose fingers. He turns his eyes on her when she takes a sip. She doesn't grimace at the taste; she's learned to appreciate alcohol while they were stuck in their little, private loop on the other side. Her newly discovered appreciation for intoxicating beverages, and that nice leather jacket she often sports, and the way she drives his car when she pesters him enough that he would let her do anything if only she would only shut up for five minutes, even the way she's learned to pester him, they're all talents he helped her develop, which makes her a little bit _his_.

"Not that she is getting any older, but it seems right to celebrate her," she says and he chooses to look at her thin fingers around the glass instead of her large eyes. He doesn't want her to read the guilt, to know what an unworthy boyfriend he has proved to be.

He can't really celebrate the birthday of the girl he misses, with the girl he can't bear to miss, can he? So, he looks away, fakes a smile which comes out more like a pained grimace.

Bonnie's voice is suddenly soft as she slides against the counter to come closer, but still not close enough to touch.

"I miss her, too," she says.

Suddenly he thinks that maybe she reconsidered and she wants to teach him a lesson after all, though trying to kill him in public won't help her, because her arms slip around his neck while she abandons the weight of her against his back. Damon thinks for a moment that she's about to strangle him because of what she thinks he was thinking, and he's about to tell her that she doesn't know the first thing about choking someone because she's doing it totally wrong; only, her chin settles on his shoulder and she's so warm and fragrant against his back and he can hear her swallowing, holding back a whimper. Raising his eyes to the mirror in front of him he can see her, petite and appallingly pretty, a little bit sad and so open.

"I'm sorry," she murmurs.

"Me too," he says back, one hand wrapping around one elbow. He never explains that he is sorry for not being brave enough to tell her that he is happy she is alive and with him.

 _If you should sink I don't want to swim_ _  
_ _If you lock the door I'll beg to come in_ _  
_ _If you should sing I won't make a sound_ _  
_ _If you should fly I'll curse the ground_ _  
_ _And if you should ever leave me I will crumble_


	2. Chapter 2

**Three days since Elena's return (and Bonnie's death).**

"I think they're clean enough," Matt says, snapping him out of his empty reverie. Damon looks at him before realizing he's been wiping his black leather boots for the whole time the young deputy has been updating the others on their progress. Not that there was any, actually.

"What would you know about it?" he asks, trying to sound annoyed and, most of all, present. "Your generation uses bird shit to make beauty masks, I'm not taking directions from you," he clarifies, pushing past Matt in the attempt to feel some kind of power over himself and the situation.

Elena's sweet eyes follow his movement and a little part of him is tempted to crawl back to her for some sort of comfort but he's too tired and frustrated for that.

They've been to every freaking morgue in the vicinity, which means five hospitals and three pathologist labs, compiling the related paperwork over and over to the point that Damon could do it blindfolded and with one arm tied behind his back. And after almost eighty hours and not a lick of sleep there's still no trace of Bonnie.

"Did you talk to Enzo?" he asks, doing his best to keep his rage at bay. He's ready to scalp the bastard himself at the first sign of him being even remotely involved in whatever happened to her, which is probably the reason why Stefan and all the others were adamant that he shouldn't have accosted Enzo for any reason.

"We did, and he's… devastated," Caroline says, making him laugh bitterly.

"Devastated? _That_ bastard?" his voice becomes strident, like he's trying to sharpen a rusty blade, as he turns toward Stefan. "He probably had something to do with it. If you remember the guy doesn't shine for loyalty. At least, not towards us," he says between his teeth, his canines out without him realizing it.

Matt moves slowly, inconspicuously, but Damon doesn't miss his palm sliding over his taser. Elena's arms slide around herself to shield her fragile, human body. His brother offers a sympathetic look as he reminds him, "We've been over this before, Damon. Enzo was with Matt when Elena came back."

No one says when _Bonnie died,_ because not one of them is ready to face the fact, and yet there's a tiny doubt in the back of his mind, a voice whispering that maybe Bonnie's death doesn't matter that much compared to the fact that Elena is alive.

 _Unless you tragically choke to death on those cocktail peanuts, and then I can tell her myself...They don't wear helmets here. Hey, ride on the train tracks, don't look both ways_.

His stomach closes like a fist and he needs to gulp down from the first bottle he can reach to keep himself from throwing up; though, what he could vomit escapes him considering he didn't eat much in the last three days.

He was too busy rubbing and wiping off some camphor ointment right under his nose while the procession of corpses went on and on, in front of his eyes. Hundreds of years in the business of precocious death and it turns out that he is way less prone to stomach the smell and the swollen bellies and the blue cuts if he's waiting for someone to raise the sheet from his best friend's face.

That morning, they spent four hours in a room with three burned bodies. The result of a very bad car accident. Damon has no clue why she had any reason to be in the vicinity of that site, but not that far away from there, there is a store where she likes to buy handcrafted scented candles. She likes to stock up on them before she has the chance to run out of them, and though he wasn't a hippy enthusiast, or anything like that, he had gotten used to them, even brought a few without her having to beg and threaten, just because she likes them.

He could never tell if she smelled like the candles or the candles smelled like her. Right now he smells like burned bodies. He is permeated with the bitter stink of words unsaid and actions postponed.

"I need a shower," he decides, ignoring everyone's stares to head up the stairs, bottle of whisky firmly in his right hand like it's an anchor that keeps him from drifting into open pain. He must walk past Elena to do so, and his step slows down on its own. He doesn't know what to tell her, what to do. Her return wasn't supposed to be like this. Everything is a mess, and he feels guilty and fucked up, but she must understand. She knew Bonnie too, she knew her first, and was ready to find her gone once she awoke from her sleep. The time Damon has been given with Bonnie wasn't even close to the time Elena had with her, it isn't fair that he had her for so little, he was counting on another sixty years, give or take, just to begin coming to terms with the fact that she wouldn't stick around for the rest of his freaking eternity. Instead, here he is, unready, unstable and, if the way Stefan looks at him is any indication, constantly on the verge of insanity.

Damon forces himself to meet Elena's eyes and relax his hardened face so that she can see that he's still there, still the Damon that had promised to wait. He waited. He was good. He has put himself to sleep for her, so he wouldn't be confused, and only came back to avoid a massacre. She offers an understanding smile and brushes the back of his hand as he walks by her. The touch he's waited for so long doesn't speed his heartbeat, but it's not her fault. His heart broke a little after all. He felt the growing crack, the widening hole, though her arms were tight about him at the time, and now he thinks they could fit a fist into his chest and he would not notice.

He is almost tempted to go look for the pieces of his heart on the doormat where Elena appeared, but he doesn't. Instead he walks into his bedroom and takes his shirt off before he's even reached the bathroom. Damon leaves the connecting door open, hoping – somewhere inside – to hear a voice complaining that he is an exhibitionist, that he should remember to mention he's naked when he tells her that she can come in, that it doesn't matter how unfazed Alaric is by his nudity, she doesn't fall into the same category of best buddies that can see you naked without raising an eyebrow.

She has a category of her own. A category that refuses the past tense.

Under the shower he tries to scrub off the awful smell of dead bodies, the heavy absence of her, their last, stupid words.

" _You are so predictable," she had accused him, rolling her eyes to the ceiling._

" _Why do I care?" he asked aloud to no one, playing the offended part, "I don't even like you that much."_

He rubs a towel over his head, to dry his thick, black hair as he walks back to the bedroom to pick something fresh to wear. How lucky that almost his whole wardrobe is made up of black clothing. The colored ones are those Bonnie brought him. He had always protested that he had a precise style that she was messing up with her unrequested attention to his wardrobe but he would hide them if she tried to bring them back to the store.

He doesn't find Matt when he gets downstairs, which annoys him. It complicates matters to be without someone with a badge while he goes about the site of an accident or while he looks for a dead body – too many people to compel, too many answers to get, and Matt can be still young as sheriff but he saw his share and he knows his job.

"He needs to eat at some point, he's still human, and he can't spend his day looking for a body," his brother tells him when he asks for the boy. "He has already reported a fake anonymous informant calling in to let him know of the body of a dead girl. He has filed a fake report for missing person and contacted the FBI, and he's been following you around at any hour of the day," he lists, as if it would change anything. Damon knows what Matt did, but he knows what he himself didn't do, too.

"But he didn't find her yet," he growls, sitting down on the couch. He'll give Donovan an hour and then they'll go back looking for her, even if he has to compel him. " _I_ didn't find her yet. She must be somewhere… but it's like she's just disappeared from the face of the earth."

"Maybe there was an accident. Maybe someone accidentally caused her death and they hid the body to avoid jail," Stefan suggests, his tone dark, the tone of his voice getting lower and lower with each word. Damon knows the feeling behind that, the mourning and the acceptation; just, he can't grasp them. "You need to start coming to terms with the fact that we could never find her."

"Maybe," Damon says, his voice raising instead, when he repeats, "Maybe they did. Or maybe…" his breath is short and he closes his mouth, his jaw rigid.

"What?" his brother presses.

"We can't find the body, Stefan," Damon says, his blue eyes moving from Stefan to an undefined point in the air, "I've been looking for her body everywhere. Maybe that's the point, maybe it's not her body I should look for, because we're wrong and she's not really-"

"Damon," his brother's voice is terse, he can hear a note of regret for being the one to point it out to him, "You know it's impossible. You know _why_ that is," and he looks behind him.

Damon turns his head over his shoulder to see Elena standing in the doorway, a frown on her pretty mouth, her eyes sad. He can't think about her sadness now. His head is so full it could explode; Bonnie's broken body is probably just a pile of limbs crumpled somewhere, he doesn't know how long her stock of candles will last and he needs to buy more if he doesn't want to forget the way she smelled (he doesn't), he needs to pick up her leather jacket from the dry-cleaning. Did she call for him at some point? It's Monday, on Mondays she likes to soak in the bath until her fingers and toes wrinkle. He should go and knock on her bathroom door before she falls asleep in the water. Did she think of him? There was something she wanted to tell him but couldn't? Does she miss him? The next time they play card he'll let her win. The last thing he told her was _I don't even like you that much_.

Damon can't think of Elena's sadness now.

#

 **Two and half months from the linking spell.**

There are faint stripes of light projected on the floor, she can guess it from behind her closed eyelids, but they are so soft that she can easily slip away while she lies on her stomach, cheek sunken into her pillow which smells of fresh laundry.

In the stillness, she can hear the rustle of the sheets and the frustrated sigh from the next bed but she ignores it. Again. For the billionth time.

"Bonnie?" he calls her name quietly, like he doesn't mean to disturb her rest. She knows better.

"Judgy, are you awake?" he asks again in a sing-song voice.

She knows how this works. He'll just keep calling and calling until she can't ignore him anymore.

"No," she answers, starkly, shutting her eyes so tight that she can see ghosts of white behind her eyelids.

"I can't sleep," he says, sounding resented, like it's actually her fault.

"It's not even midnight and I'm in bed. _Me_ , a creature of the night, in bed, at a decent hour, wearing _pajamas_ ," he protests, sounding almost whiny, "You're ruining my reputation, I'll be a laughing stock."

"I promise I won't tell anyone," she says, knowing that this won't stop him from complaining.

"That doesn't console me," he informs her, flatly. "I'm hot. And not only in the way I'm usually hot."

"We've been over this before," she says, heaving a sigh and rolling on her side so that she can look at him. His face pale and hunting in the clear night, his eyes vivid and awake. He's like an overgrown child with a hyperactivity condition and too much charm for his own good, "As long as we're sharing a bedroom you're definitely not going to sleep naked. There's no chance in hell that I'm letting you. And you're already wearing only the bottom anyway," she says, rolling her eyes so that she can stop staring at his chest. She doesn't do it on purpose, really, it's just that it's a little hard not to notice when he's propped on one elbow making a show of himself.

"You're too stiff," he accuses her with a grin.

"You're not stiff enough," she replies, reflexively, biting the inside of her mouth as soon as the words are out of it. He did it again.

"We can remedy to that," he suggests, cheerily.

A pained moan escapes from the back of her throat and she lets her face fall back against the pillow. She wants to cry, or strangle him.

"Damooon," she drags his name, exasperated.

"Bonniiiie," he drags her name, amused.

Definitely strangle him.

"I have class in the morning," she says, hoping to gain his mercy.

"Not until ten," he piques. He can never bother reading the notices pinned outside their doors but he knows her schedule like it's his own.

"You know how we could spend this very young night?"

"We're not doing it," she warns him, pointing a finger in his direction.

"Oh, com'on, you want to see me beg?" he asks, with one arched eyebrow, "Does that get your juices flowing?"

"I already told you, Damon. We are not doing it, no," she says, turning on her back, staring stubbornly at the ceiling, "That's my last word."

"Your last word will probably be something like, ' _Damon you were the single greatest thing of my life,'"_ he corrects her, and Bonnie bites down on her lips to keep herself from laughing. The smooth bastard did it again.

"That's more than one word," she informs him, trying to not sound amused and failing miserably.

"You can't give a measure to perfection. Or put Baby in a corner," he replies with a shrug, "Now, what do you say? We are friends, spending some quality time together, and tomorrow everything will be the same…"

She turns her head over the pillow, looking at him with a very vexed expression. He smiles victoriously as they both jump out of their beds to meet and pass each other in the middle of the room. She goes directly for the candles while he takes a spare blanket from a closet. Once it's laid out on the floor she's places the board in the middle.

"Not monopoly?" he asks, mouth twisting.

"You cheat at monopoly," she reminds him, looking surly at him. Damon just shrugs and grins. He loves cheating and getting her all riled up, but he loves making her say dirty words, more, and getting her all riled up and embarrassed.

It seems like a display of culture when the first word is _tribade_ and he explains that it's a word of Greek origins, and it was used to indicate "a woman who practices unnatural vices with herself or with other women". She stops him when he starts depicting the position and the act.

"Yeah, I got it. Too many details," she says raising one hand in front of him.

When his next word is _erection_ there is still a chance that it's just a strange coincidence, though the straight face he pulls is an indication to the contrary. At _asshole_ he's left any pretense and just grins her way while she blushes in the dark. She's used, by now, to his attitude and his tendency to turn anything into something dirty, but the meaningless flirting underneath it all is still embarrassing. Only it's better that he thinks her shy rather than unsettled by his shamelessness.

"I'm still winning," she points out, writing down their scores on a notepad.

"I'm still wearing my pants, so I say you're not," the laughter burst out of her against her will.

"Though they're nice," he says, looking down at his crossed legs, "Even if I would have liked them more in black."

"Boring," she says, flatly.

"Sexy," he suggests, "Predatory"

"While navy blue is not?" she thinks they look great on him, though she'll never tell him, and that she chose just fine.

"Navy blue doesn't speak of wild, erotic acts you'll blush about in the morning," he explains, like it's a _thing_.

"Well, all considered, you're converted to _only_ speaking of wild, erotic acts your hypothetical partner will blush about in the hypothetical morning," she mocks him, while her eyes follow the word _cunnilingus_ trying to keep a straight face.

He gives her a dirty look and before he can ask her if she's subtly trying to propose herself she adds, "Elena will probably like the blue better."

It's something she does, talk about Elena like she's integral part of their lives. She probably is, anyway. Damon thinks Bonnie is putting her best effort in this, being the supportive best friend, reminding him that he still has everything he holds dear and nothing has changed. So if he develops a liking to something she is not part of, it's not a big deal. And if he needs to rant about something and she's not the first person he thinks of, it's not bad. After all, she was always the focus of the conversation, never the counterpart of it.

Bonnie always makes sure to throw her name out so that he knows that no one is forgetting about her, that there is a reason why he lives like this, in a dorm with a witch, playing scrabble just to make her blush, complaining about the normal life he's rapidly getting used to. That reason is Elena. It's a story she likes to tell and he likes to hear, a story which makes them feel at ease with their common bathroom time arrangements, with their breakfast routine (he brings her coffee, she takes it before they leave the room to go and eat something, he'll steal her bacon when in the days they have scrambled eggs, she'll take a bite from his French toast when she decides she must go for the healthy, holy path; and, as an unspoken pact they never eat pancakes unless one of them has cooked them), on Wednesday they watch Mr. Robot together. From Friday to Sunday, when they can cut out some time from all the _fighting the good fight_ which she likes too much, he tries to get her drunk. She's an affectionate drunk, will laugh at anything and for nothing.

He gets a kick just seeing her laughing. The idea scrapes slightly against his brain.

"Elena won't even notice the color of my pajama bottoms, because I won't be wearing them."

Bonnie makes a face, "Easy tiger." Too many details once again. He just grins.

"We'll be all over each other the very moment she opens her eyes," he says, feeling better at his own words.

"Over my dead body", she jokes, "Pun fully intended."

He doesn't even flinch at her words, only grins. The notion of Bonnie not being there with him is just that, _words_. The idea of Bonnie's absence has no shape, no substance. His brain can be fully aware that the day Elena comes back Bonnie won't be there anymore, and yet _it's not real._ Her annoyed voice at the word _anal_ is real, the pillow flying off her bed and hitting him in the face is real, the hairs he always finds on his shirts are real. Not Bonnie not being there one day.

"I'll wait for your body to get cold," he informs her with a slight, "Only because it's you," he clarifies, like he's making a huge sacrifice.

"So, two hours?" she asks, with a smile, "I'm touched. And un-fooled."

"Hey, I'll _try._ " And she laughs.


	3. Chapter 3

**One week after Elena's return (and Bonnie's death).**

Damon turns his head to the side, feeling the bones behind his trachea clicking back into place. His neck is stiff and he grimaces, recognizing the after-effects of a violent breaking. He opens his eyes and brings his hand to his jaw, testing its mobility. He can see the ceiling of their sitting room above him, and feel the softness of the cushion sofa under his back and legs.

He thinks something trivial as he pushes his feet off the sofa. He thinks that the fabric could get dirty because no one had the decency to take off his boots before dumping his body there.

He thinks something thrilling as he puts his feet back on the floor. He thinks that he can smell the scent of her coming from upstairs as he inhales – not a lingering trace but the constant it was - and so everything goes back into place, the way his neck did, the way his heart will.

He feels slightly dizzy walking up the stairs – not that he'll tell her, she might think him so fucking relived to have her back as to not be incapable of standing on his feet – and he can see a shadow projecting over his open bedroom door as the girl inside moves easily.

When he steps inside, the diary she always writes on is open. One pages trembles like it's been recently turned. The candle on his nightstand is burning and he can hear water running in his bathroom. Did she write about where the fuck she's been while he went crazy looking for her? She's going to be mad at him for reading but he wants to peek anyway. He walks to the bed, blocks the page with two fingers pressed down on the corner and reads the header. There is no date but her confused writing reads, " _Dear Elena, your boyfriend is the most systematic roommate ever. Should I take a wild stab in the dark, I'd say he has a future as a serial killer. I'm surprised to say that there's no pun intended, because he looks over-"_

"That's personal," a voice reproaches sweetly, making him turn.

Damon looks at Elena, and then back at the diary and one corner of his mouth turns up in a bitter grimace, before he bends over the candle to blow off the flame. He went back to Bonnie's store and they told him that particular candle is out of production. He can feel his heart sinking. He should have known better.

"What are you doing?" he asks, though the answer is pretty clear. His tone is not the most welcoming, and he regrets it but she just accidentally poured salt on a bone-deep wound and he thinks he'll push back the sweet talking to a moment when he doesn't feel like dying.

"I was reading our journal…" she says, and a sort of jealousy bites at his ankles because Elena can share something with Bonnie even now that she's not around, while he is left with a stock of candles that will end sooner rather than later and a leather jacket hanging in his own closet.

"Something interesting?" he asks, knowing full well that between the heretics in town, their truce with his psychotic mother, the old disturbed love interests and even more disturbing rekindling, and all that followed she's got herself a pretty good ride in a YA novel, but a little voice inside his head wonders what Bonnie wrote about him. They were best friends, and they have lived together for a long time, so he could tell what she was thinking before she realized it herself, but it doesn't mean he is entirely against some flattering about what a wonderful friend he is, about how lucky she would have been to have a boyfriend like him.

Elena smiles at him indulgently, "Yeah, she told me that you decided to take a sixty-year break in your dating life," she explains, her eyes soft, sounding clearly touched. "To me, you were always loyal to a fault. Which is why I couldn't help myself but love you, though I tried very hard not to."

He wonders if Bonnie ever saw that, if she ever saw his loyalty and thought at some point that she couldn't help herself but to love him. The thought is as unbidden as it is upsetting. She was his best friend, and of course she loved him, and thinking about that now won't make him feel her absence any less.

"Where's my brother?" he asks, trying to change the topic of their conversation. He's not ready to fall back into the routine of the happy couple. Well, they weren't much happy to begin with, unless they were naked anyway. "I wanted to thank him for kindly attacking me from behind and breaking my neck," he explains sarcastically.

He remembers, now, the little speech he was trying to get together, about how hard it was since they couldn't say goodbye, about his desperate hunt for her body so that he could reach closure. Luckily for him, his brother twisted his neck before he could say something utterly stupid like screaming that he did not want closure, he just wanted Bonnie.

"He was trying to help you," she reproaches him, "You haven't slept in a week," she says, with her open expression, sitting on the edge of his bed like she's waiting for him to pour his pain out like a girl that draws hearts in her journal and sighs over the football team's captain.

He doesn't mean to appear ungrateful, nor bothered, though he is, so he takes a breath, looks around the room like he can see an escape route somewhere, a way to divert her attention from her good deed of the day, and he sees it. A folded cardigan on a chair, her hairbrush on the writing table, a flowery scarf hanging from the hook, and he realizes that she's been living with him without him noticing, which is not that surprising considering that he didn't sleep in a week and therefore he barely passed though his bedroom to take a shower and leave again.

She is right where he always wanted her and it feels like having worked on a puzzle for an eternity only to have trouble inserting the very last piece. He has waited for her, hasn't he? He waited for this, and he can't wrap his mind around the fact that he doesn't feel an ounce of what he was sure he would.

"I know you need time adjusting to all the changes, but I am here for you," she says, "We can do that together," her hand reaching out to take his, at his side. Damon looks down, sees the tiny fingers gripping his own and her touch is gentle, light, so _foreign_. The girl he was with would be tearing his clothes off, forcing him to feel again and reconnect with her, and though he's grateful that she isn't— because he'd feel even a bigger loser for turning her down —he can't help but wonder how they will manage to get it right.

He can recognize the old Elena, the girl he idolized when Katherine turned out to be his own personal fantasy; with her he could never get it right, her heart was Stefan's. If she hadn't become a vampire her heart would still belong to Stefan. Somewhere inside, he is still convinced that that is the way it should have been. Maybe it's karma, maybe he suffered long enough, bad enough, that life is compensating him offering an unpolluted Elena, someone that will not bring out the worst in him. Someone that can actually make him a better person.

He liked himself well enough when Bonnie was around. She called him out on his shit and she had that murderous look on her face whenever he fucked up, which was quite often, but even when she went at him with all her indignation and fury he could feel her acceptance, like he couldn't even hope to screw things up bad enough to drive her away so he'd better come to terms with it.

He wants to tell her that she can't possibly understand, that he can't adjust to this, but he can't bring himself to say the words. Bonnie was Elena's best friend, too, after all. If someone can understand what it feels to lose her, then that someone is Elena; and yet, it is not quite the same. In a world where even the last miserable human being can appeal to Elena's affections, Bonnie was an extraordinary friend she will remember dearly. In a world where he learned to live without any permanent presence, Bonnie is the one thing without which he can't take a step ahead, like a stylus jammed on a record player, repeating the same damn verse of a song over and over.

But he can't tell her that, no, so he just nods, his rational side knowing well that this is what he is supposed to do, let the love of the girl he waited for heal him. Make himself believe that she can.

Elena pulls at him with both her hands, making him lay in the middle of the bed. He complies, half absent, half dazed. It's been a long time since he used his bed and he lies there waiting for familiarity to slide in, to make things better. She puts her cheek on his shoulder, lets her hand rest in the middle of his chest. Automatically his arm reaches around her to enclose her against him. Stupidly, he doesn't know where to put his hand, how to embrace her body. It's unsettling, and he doesn't listen to that voice, that instinct, that tells him that they don't fit anymore.

He remembers suddenly that he missed _The Bodyguard_ on TV and he is about to groan when he realizes that he has no reason to watch that movie anymore and stops himself.

"It feels good to be in your arms," he hears Elena say.

When he is forced to realize that it doesn't feel the same for him, he makes a sound of approval so he won't have to lie to her. In time, he thinks, he will get used to her again, and they will fit and a scented candle going out of production won't hurt so bad. Yes, in time, he tells himself, in time.

#

 **Four months after the linking spell.**

He likes this bar because they have good scotch in a list of watered down beverages for kids that want to play at being the next Humphrey Bogart and they play no song written after 1987. Oh yes, he misses One Direction but he thinks he can survive if he tries hard enough; this is what he said to a girl that approached him a week before at the counter, anyway.

He slips his cell phone back in the pocket of his jacket smiling to himself as he takes his glass again. Alaric slides back on the stool next to him, sighing heavily without looking his way.

"I have class in the morning," he informs him, "Five minutes and we're going," he warns, knowing that Damon will look at him like he has a dying wish. You can't really tell a vampire to keep decent hours without some sort of violent consequence.

"I think I'll stay, thanks," Damon informs him cheerily.

"I thought the point of inviting me to drink with you was so that you wouldn't be alone," Alaric says, taking a sip from his half empty glass.

"Yes, and I won't be. The cavalry is coming as we speak," he informs him, raising his glass to him.

"What did you threaten?" he asks patiently.

"Nothing," his friend answers innocently, "I just wrote her a few texts which can be interpreted as tipsy talk, and probably at some point told her that the barman has cut himself with a knife and he doesn't smell half so bad," he explains, shrugging his shoulders. "It's not my fault that she has this Red Cross complex about her that will make her come here in the span of ten minutes, _tops_."

He looks way too pleased with himself and his evil plan for Alaric to feel inclined to let him enjoy the moment without trying to burst his bubble. Damon can be very smart, but obviously Damon can be even more stupid.

"So you tricked a very attractive young woman to drink with you so that she can keep you from being tempted by some young woman that could make sweet eyes at you?" he asks with a derisive tone.

"She is not an attractive woman," Damon corrects him, "She's my best friend," he says, like he is being extremely reasonable.

"Your best friend looks like she just stepped out from a page of the latest _Playboy_ issue," he points out, like there is no way he could miss out on that tiny detail.

For a moment he thinks that Damon is picturing that, then he turns his head sharply, putting down the glass he was holding. "Don't even _think_ about it," he hisses, sounding like he already has a place to hide his body in case it was needed, "You're too old for her."

"You're older than I am," Alaric points out, "That has never stopped you before. Besides, that's not the point. I'm telling you that living in close quarters with someone like Bonnie could easily backfire on you. And to make it worse, you pester her even when you don't have to."

" _Please_ ," Damon says with a superior grin, "What is this, _Clueless_? I am already in love with the most perfect girl on earth. And I can control myself perfectly, anyway."

"Then why did you trick her into coming over?" he asks, unconvinced.

"It's a mutual arrangement. We take care of each other. She makes sure no frisky little thing tries to make an attempt on my virtue, and I make sure she doesn't bury herself under her books until she suffocates and dies." He is so convinced of what he's saying that Alaric wants to laugh in his face.

"I thought you weren't so averse to her dying," he says, in a low tone, like he's not really talking to him.

"Every sane male in a perfectly working relationship needs some buddy-time, you know, it makes for a healthy rapport," he grimaces, surprised that Alaric doesn't get it on his own. "It just so happens that my buddy-time will last for the next sixty years, so what?" his pitch rising, scandalized he needs to explain it in so many words.

"Nothing," his friend replies, "You know, I like Bonnie-"

"Try not to like her too much," he murmurs starkly.

"-but she doesn't look like the average buddy."

"Another reference to erotic publications or anything of the sort and I'm breaking your nose," he warns him, with a cutting tone.

"You make innuendos all the time," Alaric reminds him.

"I like to make her blush. It's not like I'm trying to get into her pants," Alaric wants to objects that that only makes it worse, because he's not looking for a ride, no, he wants her company, her care and her blushes, so for all his talk, Alaric can see the path he's on. Only, it's useless to try to make Damon see something he's set on being blind to. And maybe he's wrong. Maybe Damon is really unable to love anything else but Elena.

"I am not either, so I think I'll leave and let her handle you on her own."

When his friend doesn't protest at his chosen words but just grins his way, he just shakes his head. This can only go _wrong_.

Etta James is playing in the background when she arrives, murderous look on her face, her purse strangled in her right hand before she slaps it on the counter top. He smiles innocently at her, ignoring her expression and pulling out the stool for her.

"Here's my girl," he says, slapping the top of the stool to signal her to sit down. She does, with poor enthusiasm.

"I was studying, Damon," she informs him.

"You're welcome, Bonnie," he replies, raising one hand to call the barman. "One beer. Honey, large," he instructs. It's a full-bodied beer, slightly sweet with hints of caramel. She likes the creamy texture and the copper color of that kind.

She patiently looks at the barman bringing over the beer he ordered for her before informing him with an annoyed tone that "He has no bandage on his hands."

He ignores her while a waitress walks behind him and glances at Bonnie.

"Don't think of him. You're supposed to worry about me and the sanctity of my relationship with Elena," and he can hear her eyes rolling up in her skull. Nonetheless she grabs the pint with both hands.

"If you're not interested you can say _no_ ," she reminds him taking a sip of beer. It's obvious she needed a break from all the studying. He can see the tense nerves in her shoulders, though she can't recognize that much herself.

"I don't want to hurt their feelings," he replies, badly playing the part of the sensitive guy.

"Yes, I forgot how thoughtful you are," she says, and he let the dripping sarcasm totally escape his attention.

"It wouldn't hurt if you were a bit sweeter towards me, you know?"

"I beg to disagree," she replies flatly.

Damon just smiles and waves two fingers at the waitress, who comes over immediately, though she was just going towards another client one moment before.

"You need something?" Her voice is honey, and he enjoys it, would kiss her just to reward her excellent taste, but she's been sending clear signals all night and he's got a mission.

"My girlfriend needs something sweet, and since she's still drinking her beer and going down on her in public would raise a few eyebrows, I was wondering if you have something good on the menu, just to appease her before we get to the good part of the night," he explains ignoring Bonnie's groan as she lets her face sink in between her hands.

"Uh, oh, sure…" she tries to say, though all she does is stumble over monosyllabic sounds, "I'll- I'll go and check in the kitchen."

"That would be great, thank you." The kick in the shin comes the very moment the girl turns her back to go. He clamps down and manages a grin, as she starts her protestations.

"I already told you, Damon. You can't use me as scarecrow against the girls that have poor taste enough to throw themselves at you!"

"I see you peeking when I get out of the shower," he objects, offended.

"You walk around half naked trying to pick an argument until I _have_ to look," she corrects him, "Besides, that's not the point. You can count on me for everything _but_ this."

"Why not?" he asks, sounding whiny. He's a master in that tone.

"Because you don't want a romantic life, but I _do_. And it's a bit hard to be asked out by someone when they think I am already in a relationship," she looks at him with wide eyes and an exasperated expression that looks quite endearing on her.

"Wrong," he says, raising a finger in front of her, "I'm providing an obstacle, which is what every great love story needs. If it's easy it's not worth it. Instead, if they think you're taken, they'll have to fight for you. That's _romantic._ I'm actually doing you good," and he raises his eyebrows suggestively.

She just shakes her head. "You're not. At all. And to make it worse, you're always scowling at anyone that gets close to me."

"I just look out for you. As your best friend, it's my duty. They could be murderers, psychopaths…"

"I already live with one," she replies flatly.

He uses a crooked finger to hold her chin up as the waitress comes back with a slice of chocolate cake, "Very funny, Bon-Bon," he replies between his teeth.

"It's spicy chocolate," she informs them trying not to look too disappointed and failing miserably.

"Oh, it'll do," he nods towards her before winking Bonnie's way.

She looks away as she mutters under her breath, "If you think you'll get away with this you're wrong,"

"You know I like it rough," he replies conversationally, letting the waitress overhear them. He's having so much fun he manages to keep going even after the waitress has left. At some point she burst one vessel in his brain and he jumps from the sudden pain, laughing as soon as the vein has gone _pop_.

The more irritated she gets, the more beautiful she looks, and it's good anyone in the bar thinks of her as his girlfriend otherwise she'd be chasing them away with a broom.

"Com'on, relax," he says, nudging at her with his elbow, "I did your courses at least twice, so out of gratitude for your _spontaneous_ help, I'll help you brush up on whatever subject before the test." He doesn't know if it's the nudging or the proposal that gets him a smile, but he's content anyway.

He can see Alaric's point – though Alaric shouldn't if he knows what's good for him – but he just wants her to be with someone that understands the wonderful person she is, rather than being eager to get into her pants. So, if he hampers her romantic life a bit, it's only out of friendship; and, in the meantime he's there to remind her to live a little, to make her blush, to endure her choices in movies and her untidiness. And when someone deserving of her comes along, he will have no trouble setting himself aside, he tells himself.

Before her pint is empty she's already tipsy. Wrapping his arm around her side is needed to help her stand on her feet, and it's required of every good boyfriend.

"The cake was good," she murmurs against his skin, "I like the way honey beer tastes."

"I know," he murmurs back, against her forehead.

He needs to bend a bit at the knees but the result is that she is perfectly snuggled against him, purse pressed in between their bodies, face in crook of his neck and nose tickling the column of it, the warmth and the scent of her spreading through him like a sweet disease.

 _If you go away, as I know you must,_ _  
_ _There'll be nothing left in the world to trust_ _  
_ _Just an empty room filled with empty space_

 _(Can I tell you now, as you turn to go_ _  
_ _I'll be dying slowly 'til your next hello)_

 _#_

 **Note:** the song I used at the end of the chapter is " _If you go away_ " by Neil Diamond.


	4. Chapter 4

**Three weeks after Elena's return (and Bonnie's death).**

He doesn't really know much about loss. His experience is limited to his mother and Katherine. The first felt more like an abandonment. He was young and resentful because she was the only kind person he knew and yet so distant, often times, that when she died some part of him felt the slight of rejection and held on to that, cradling his anger so long, so dearly, that the second time he lost her – right there, in front of him, full of disdain and pain over a son she never had, indifferent to the one she had abandoned — it didn't even hurt that much.

Then there was Katherine, a toxic illusion he chased after for an embarrassing amount of decades, and though she wasn't with him, she was never really lost. So he doesn't think she really counts. In many ways she stopped counting long ago.

Not even Alaric counts in that department because every now and then he dies, and then he's back again, popping out of a shadow like a mushroom. Only his girlfriends aren't that lucky.

And Elena was only taking a very long nap. He only needed to wait.

So, no, Damon has not a great knowledge about loss. The awareness of the simple fact that Bonnie will never roll her eyes at him, or ask him "Seriously?" with that annoyed, stark look he likes so much has left this void inside. It makes him absently scratch at the middle of his chest, over his shirts, with white nails, trying to reach the emptiness he feels, a habit he is not even aware of until Stefan stops to stare at him, with something akin to pity sparking in his eyes. It makes him angry, and in a way relived, because then it means he is still able to feel something.

Damon knows they all speak about her, with that placid, endearing tone people use when they recall their childhood memories, the inflection that colors the words showing that those are times long gone, and that person they were does not exists anymore. They may be sad for her absence, but they made peace with it.

They never say her name in front of him, and when he comes back after spending hours searching in every ditch and hole they do not ask anymore what he has found. He never finds anything, not her nor a way to let go.

Maybe it's to fill the hollow they feel inside that they spend so much time cooking and eating together. All gathered around a table, talking and laughing and trying to feel less like the world could end tomorrow. He has nothing against the world ending tomorrow, in fact he'd like that. He'd especially like that when Elena brushes her fingertips over the back of his hand while he holds a glass of bourbon and tells him that they arranged a funeral for Bonnie.

Her fingers are warm, feel almost clammy, it's so uncomfortable that he wants to shake her hand off but he doesn't, almost counting the seconds until her hand falls away. Her eyes are gentle, and if he could be bothered, he'd worry over the guilt pooling at the pit of his stomach.

"It will help us heal," she explains, and though she makes herself soft and understanding his gaze turns cold. Nonetheless she seems ready to let him be a shitty boyfriend for an undetermined amount of time, and doesn't even bat an eye before his mood swing.

" _Vampire_ , remember?" he asks, drinking off the glass, "I heal well on my own. But you can cry around a headstone all you like." He remembers the last time they mourned her, but this time around he can't stomach the smallness or the composure of it, "I suppose you can just re-use the last one. It will save time and money."

"You're not healing," she objects with a kind tone, not wanting to provoke his rage.

"I'm not hurt," he piques, abandoning his empty glass on the cabinet, turning to her and widening his arms to show his perfect, strong, untouched body. He is not hurt, he is only _dying_.

Elena looks at him with a sort of melancholy, and then reaches out, slipping her arms around him, cheek pressed hard against his chest. His grin disappears, and he puts his hands on her shoulders, torn between holding on to her and pushing her away. He settles for resting his palms against her petite body.

She's not as petite as Bonnie. When Bonnie hugged him she used to rub her nose over his heart. It tickled in a nice way.

He knows what awaits him if he gives in to Elena. Everyone will be appropriately dressed, there will be tears shining in their eyes, the make-up of the girls won't melt because they will use waterproof stuff, the red swollen eyes will only make them look endearing, re-awakening the need to protect them. Stefan will let Caroline crumple his black suit jacket and leave a darker, damp spot on his shoulder. Matt will stand straight in that military composure of his, jaw tight and pretty. Elena will look beautiful and child-like. There will be an obituary of two lines on the mortuary notice of the local paper and someone will bother to send flowers. People will talk about her with pity because " _she was so young", "oh, but what do you expect? Her mother abandoned her, her father died, it's probably for the best." "She already had suffered so much.", "She was rather pretty, such a shame." "They never found the body. Maybe she just took off with some boy and is making everyone worried sick."_ Everyone will forget all about her in the space of a week.

He doesn't want to stare down at a stupid headstone and talk about his feelings. He wants people to choke on the buffet and on their tongues when they speak of her like they knew anything she was. He wants to chase after them playing the game of the cat and mouse, see the terror making their limbs tremble and their feet stumble all over themselves. He wants to leave a trail of bodies in the middle of every damn road of Mystic Falls, slaughtered corpses sprawled on their comfortable beds. He wants cars to halt in front of the carcasses abandoned on the concrete, wants to use their blood to mark their front doors with her name. The news will talk about that horror. People around the world will stare at the screen with their mouths hanging and their bodies shrinking in terror. If anything else, one ounce of pain will reach the farthest corner of the world so maybe somebody will understand, and when someone finds their voice again and asks what the hell happened the answer will be "Bonnie Bennett died". And no one will forget anymore.

This would be an appropriate funeral, he thinks. Bonnie would kick his ass just for thinking of it. But Bonnie is not here to kick his ass anymore, and his body is so numb that no matter how hard he holds on to Elena, he can't feel her at all.

"You're holding on too tight," she says breathlessly, her voice muffled against the skin at the base of his neck. He can't relax his arms enough to let her lip away, in his head it's not Elena he's holding on to.

"Damon." It's Alaric's hand on his shoulder to awaken him from his reverie. His friend pulls him back and Damon is fast to put space between them, his grin appears out of habit, his self-defense kicking in immediately.

"Sorry," he offers with a wink, "I forgot the revised version of you is not much into the kinky stuff." He shrugs. "Maybe you'll want to try, someday," he jokes, "You know how persuasive I can be".

Alaric looks at the empty glass on the cabinet and directs a patient look at him, with a clear subtitle stating, _Don't screw up, Damon_. "I'll go make us some coffee," he says instead, "You want some, I'm sure," he adds, in a way that should sound threatening.

Elena's big doe eyes are on him when they are alone once again. She looks so much like the girl he dreamed of that he can't help himself but feel a certain longing for the time when things were simpler and nothing else mattered. If he looks into her eyes long enough maybe the world will fade away like it used to, and pain will barely be a pinch. Her eyes are so warm, so _alive_. Not in the fiery, almost violent way Bonnie's were, they are much more calm and peaceful.

"So, did you pick your courses?" he asks, trying to look interested to hearing her answer. She's moving on, as anyone else. She has no time to waste, because she's human, and with their track records you can never know when the next villain will try and take her out of the picture. He has no reason to blame her for trying to get a hold of her life. He is a vampire, what does he know about not wasting time?

"Yes," she says, "I'll go back to med school soon." He's been in too many morgues not to wonder what the first corpse that his lovely holdover girlfriend will slice up and cut open will be.

"I want to help people." The way she looks at him makes him feel like she just picked him as her first case. She will be the warm, pretty healer of his pain, and he will be grateful forever, worshipping the ground she walks on. Well, the latter part—he always did it pretty well, didn't he?

He ignores the meaning behind her words and nods, "Good," he says absently, and he feels a cold shiver running down his spine thinking that maybe she'll soon face a body only to find out, through tests and matches, that it's his judgy pain in the ass of a shamefully beautiful best friend.

Maybe she can feel him slipping away, because Elena's voice breaks through his thoughts.

"Would you hold me again?" she asks, and he finds himself nodding. Maybe if he touches her, he thinks as he reaches out, that peace she seems to possess will soak through his clothes, fill up his bones, that void inside won't feel so large anymore, and its rumbling echo will stop making him tremble so unexpectedly like the wreck of a man.

Elena keeps her chin up, staring at him, holding his gaze and he does the same. The girl he's been waiting for is back to him, and she is waiting too. It should make all the difference in the world, that he is worth waiting for, too, but he doesn't know where to start and be himself again.

She looks so tender, and so sad, and they only ever had one solution to every problem. So it is very rational, the process that leads him to leaning down to kiss her forehead, it is even more rational the voice that asks him what kind of gay boyfriend he's turned into to chose such a chaste goal for his lips. So he leans down still, past his first destination and kisses her lips tentatively. The kiss seems new, and clumsy, she smiles when he retreats and he does, too. He feels no need to kiss her again, no desire stirs inside, but she looks happier then he's seen her in weeks, and Bonnie would approve of him making Elena happy.

Once again she presses her cheek over his chest, murmuring, "I know it is terrible to lose a friend and there are moments when everything seems meaningless, but it will pass," like Bonnie is some kind of cold he accidentally got, like she could just pass like that. "You just need to hold on to me and it's gonna be alright."

Her arms around him feel like he's wearing a jacket in the wrong size. it doesn't feel comfortable, it doesn't suit him, and he just wants to take it off, tear it away so that it will stop clinging to him.

"Yes," he agrees. He can't tell her that she's wrong.

#

 **Five months and half after the linking spell.**

He meets her eyes when he opens the door of the dorm without bothering to knock. She tries giving him a surly look that he conveniently ignores. They went over this before, she always argues that he needs to learn boundaries and remember not to cross them, but right now he has other things on his mind and she knows it well.

The door closes behind him with a louder sound that he meant to, but she's not impressed. There's not much that can impress Bonnie Bennett.

"So, I took home our very own Louis Creed and stayed over to make sure he was not going to try and make it to the second half of the movie."

She nods, her lips pressed in a tight smile as she puts a cup of tea on the nightstand and picks up a notebook to study for something she doesn't even need to – he knows her schedule by heart and she's just avoiding talking to him in hope that he will let the subject drop. Not a fat chance at that.

"You have nothing to say?" he asks, taking a step forward and opening his hands mid-air.

She shrugs, like she doesn't know what he expects from her, and mumbles a "Good?" under her breath, low enough that if it wasn't for his empowered hearing he wouldn't even know she'd spoken at all. She sits on her bed, legs bent in front of her.

"Didn't it cross your mind that Alaric could go ballistic watching you make his revived corpse bride pack her bags for the other side, _again_?" he asks, wondering where the hell Miss Prudence Bennett went now that he's so in the mood to see her. "You should have informed me _before_."

She barely hums her response, rolling her eyes at him. It makes him flip the way she's so careless with her own safety. His friend did take his anger out on the furniture, but what if things got bad? What if she had to choose between his life and her own? She's predictable enough that he could describe the outcome of it painfully easily.

"What? Are you trying to make me have an anticipated date with my girlfriend?" he asks, not bothering to keep his voice down, "So nice of you. My condoms packet was about to expire." He would have loved to take his rage out on Alaric, but the man was almost catatonic at the moment and Bonnie would have never let him hear the end of it, so she's his last resource for some old-fashioned relief.

"Well, it would be a change in the trend. And someone could be happy," she murmurs, noting down something in her notebook as she keeps it open on her thighs. She smiles while talking but it doesn't reach her eyes, and he can see the weight on her, because it seems that she broke someone apart yet again, and she can't stand it; though, it was for the best. And he can see that though it's warm outside and her arms are naked the top she's wearing covers her neck entirely.

"What are you not telling me?" he blurts out while a voice nags at him, hitting on a particular point of his brain to cause a conditioned response. There's something wrong and it just bothers him that he can't tell what it is, like a word that just on the tip of your tongue but you can't spit it out.

Damon sits on her bed in a fluid, fast movement, facing her and tears the notebook from her hands, letting it fall behind him on the floor.

"I'm trying to study!" she protests, forgetting herself. Her voice is raspy, it dies out on a vowel, and she grimaces at the pain the effort to speak gives her.

"What—"

"It's nothing—" she tries to say, but his hands are already at her neck, pushing down the fabric of her top and under it he can see a bluish collar that does not belong to her caramel skin. His fingertips trace it and she barely flinches, assuring him that "It's really nothing, I'm fine," but it's hard to speak and he's standing before he can even think about it. He doesn't know what he's going to do but it seems like she does for she holds on to his hands and pulls him back on the bed with an almost inaudible grunt. The fall of his body makes the mattress bounce a bit and she looks at him like she's scolding a child.

"Don't."

"I took care of the bastard," he says, sounding incredulous, "I should have kicked his ass until my foot came out of his fucking mouth!" he protests, and the more she looks tiredly at him the angrier he gets, "And what did _you_ do?"

"What did you expect me to do?" her voice is thin and rasping and she coughs on the last word, bringing one hand to the base of her neck.

"Whatever made the story end with you not getting the shortest end of the stick," he says, reaching his hand out to take the cup of tea and help her drink it. He doesn't let go of it even when her hands are wrapped around the paper cup. Her hands are so small and delicate he doesn't want to trust them with the job.

"Now it's on me to avenge you," he tries to sound lighthearted but she knows better and her eyes barely soften on him when she reminds him, "He's your best friend."

"And what are you then?" he asks brusquely.

The corners of her lips turn down as she looks away. He doesn't know how they got here but this conversation is rapidly deteriorating and she's hurt and he doesn't want to pile up on that.

"Stop being mad at me. Launching yourself on a righteous tirade on my shameful behavior and my poor lack of sensitivity will only hurt your throat," he sighs, his hand wraps gently around her neck, thumb brushing the corner of her jaw, and she turns to him. "I promise I will leave him alone. Maybe I will allude to me cutting his balls if he touches you again or doesn't apologize to you crawling on his hands and knees, wagging his tail like the dog he is, but I won't do more than that. I promise."

Her lips twitch lightly and finally, after what seems like an eternity has passed, she smiles.

"I'm a keeper, aren't I?" he asks, while she covers the hand still placed on her neck with hers, "You're so lucky to have me in your life. Such a shame you can't speak, I know you're dying to praise my noble spirit and—"

She laughs. The sound is not clear and warm like it is usually. It sparks a little anger thinking of Alaric manhandling her but then her lips press down on his pulse point at the wrist, a clear attempt at expressing all the gratitude and the pride she can't express with her voice and suddenly there's an overload in his body. A jolt of pure electricity.

His lungs shut down, there's a blackout in his brain, his skin is hot and suddenly a single spark originated by a brush of skin has ignited a forge in the pit of his stomach, and something is becoming steel. His breathing becomes something completely alienated from his control and there's an utter emptiness all wrapped around a hunger that has him in agony. And she's so close he could just _eat_ her and placate it all.

Damon tightens his hold on her, sees her eyes widening in surprise when he pulls her to him but there's luckily a chink in the fog of need that has surrounded him so that he manages, not without effort, to not rob her mouth of air. Instead he forces his lips against the skin of her forehead, keeping her there for long, long seconds, trying to regain some composure, to reassure himself it was a momentary madness. A slip of his reason.

There's panic rising in his throat, threatening to choke him. It's painful and exhilarating, and he can only hold her and hide his face against her neck where the bruises speak to him of the girl he can't protect, much less rob of kisses that should not belong to him.

His stupid heart is hammering like crazy inside his chest and he tries to think of Elena, think of the future that awaits them, and think of the moment when he'll see her again; yet, he can't shake off the feeling that he has just betrayed her. He can be a murderer and a monster but he has this going for him, he is devoted. He is devoted to Elena, and if he just for a moment has desired to kiss another, it does not take away from his loyalty, for it was a short-lived loss of lucidity, and if he's still holding on to Bonnie, it's because she's his touchstone and his best friend and she can keep him grounded.

He needs to be kept grounded now. And she does that, slipping her arms around him like she's sensing his distress, using her palms to soothe away the worry, letting him have this minute before he comes back to his senses and remembers that everything it's going to be alright.

Damon just needs to hold on to her and he'll remember that everything it's going to be alright.

 _Your kisses burn into my skin,_ _  
_ _Only love can hurt like this_ _  
_ _But it's the sweetest pain_

 _(Only love can hurt like this_ _  
_ _Must have been a deadly kiss)_

 _#_

 **Note:** I don't think there's any need to tell you that my muse has packed and left me hanging, I'm very sorry, I'm still doing my best to try and force a few words out of me so that I can repay your support. The song at the end of this chapter is " _Only love can hurt like this_ " by Paloma Faith. _Merry Christmas to all my readers, you should know I truly love you all._


	5. Chapter 5

**Four weeks after Elena's return (and Bonnie's death).**

He hasn't gone out for days, nor checked his answering machine frantically looking for a trace of Bonnie. Sometimes he can forget the whole thing long enough to think she went away on vacation, that she is going to come around lamenting that he forgot to buy her Greek yogurt just because she hasn't been around to remind him.

In a way it gets easier because she didn't die, she didn't leave him. He just has to busy himself until she comes back.

It's basically what she did when Elena went into a coma; only, back then Bonnie was around to drag him out of whatever depressing hole he was hiding in. Elena isn't good at this.

She tries giving him time, first. Then, when he makes no move to snap out of it she suffocates him with sweet nothings, assuring him that _it will pass_ , and _hurt less_ , and _they're going to be alright together_. Things he doesn't want to hear.

Then she decides they need to reconnect, so they start with little things. The first try is movie nights. They remind him so much of Bonnie he jumps up to drag her out and grab a bite as soon as he hears the rumbling of her stomach. They stop at the Grill, looking for a familiar place, one that will remind them of the old days, but in the old days they fucked a lot and never stayed in any bar or restaurant long enough to get to dessert. It's very much like a first date, she's shy and he feels like an idiot.

When the waiter comes to take their order he asks for what Bonnie usually eats. She's very systematic, for all her wanting of a culinary adventure she always gets the same thing – turkey burger topped with chive aioli, chopped bacon, lettuce and tomato. Elena doesn't recognize the dish because it's not been long since Bonnie gave her loyalty to it, so he accepts her smile and lets her order for herself.

Before the plates are brought to their table she drags him to dance. She looks up at him adoringly and it makes him smile. He's the man, the one that leads. There's no protest. They are not force against force waiting for one to give in, which is usually quite fun. No, they are the romantic couple at the centre of the world. He's the one that guides, she's the one that follows obediently as his promise of romance dangles before her, and it's nice. Not everything is a fight, not everything an explosion, but it's good.

And for tonight he can forget that this Elena, so clean and so human, cannot follow him through his dark paths—that she can barely stand the sight of blood without the turning of her stomach even though she chose a field in which she possibly won't do much else but that—and she will never understand half the shit going through his head.

But the night is nice, enjoyable. He plays the dangerous seducer and the thoughtful boyfriend and has someone look at him like he's the romantic hero of a movie. It's liberating and they kiss outside the door and soon he's gently pressing her until they're stumbling up the stairs and getting naked on their way to his bedroom.

She stops him when she falls, sitting, onto the bed, and breathlessly tells him to give her a moment. He fears she's going to back out of it, when he feels so high, so eager to move on, feel complete again, prove to himself he can forget the pain, forget the loss, be whole again if much less then what he was when Bonnie was with him.

He pushes away the very idea of her as soon as it appears between his thoughts and nods to Elena when she disappears behind his bathroom door to freshen herself up. The Elena he was used to would have been naked and under him by now but he doesn't mind the change.

Damon passes one hand through his hair, holds to the feeling of lightness and excitement for this spark of hope they just ignited. His bathroom door opens up. Elena smiles timidly at him from the other side and then the spark becomes a fire, a living thing that seem to brighten up the night, and it smells like Bonnie.

He recognizes it instantly. It's fast and dizzying. He hears the clicking of the front door, the steps and smell—that familiar scent he's become so jealous and greedy of, and he knows she's back.

"Bonnie," he says, making Elena look confused and unsure.

"What?" she asks, but he's already rushing down the stairs, thinking that he _knew_ she was alive, he _knew_ she couldn't leave him like this.

But Caroline is laughing, completely unaware of what she did, eyes lit up and on Stefan.

"What the _fuck_ does this mean?" he almost roars in her face, making her turn to him with wide eyes and a frown on her pretty face. Somewhere in his brain there is a voice of reason, probably, but it cannot speak over his anger and his hurt.

"Damon, I don't know what you're talking about," the blonde vampire says, dismayed, while Stefan's face tenses.

"Oh, you don't?" he asks, incredulous, "Are you trying to play games with me?" he presses. "Why do you smell like her?"

Caroline is actually bothered. "Like you are anything more but a glitch on my radar," she informs him, grimacing, completely uncaring that he is ten seconds away from breaking her delicate neck. "It was a gift and I intend to use it."

"Damon, you need to calm down," his brother tries to cut in gently but he ignores him.

"You never liked it!" he yells in her face as Stefan tries to get between them. Bonnie adored that scent, she brought candles and oils and essences made with it.

"I do, now!" she protests, and it wouldn't take a big stretch of imagination to understand that Caroline just misses her friend and decided to have her around in one of the few ways she can, but Damon can't bear to have her in bits and pieces. "You're not the only one missing her, you self-centered asshole! We loved her, too!" she accuses.

"Not the way _I_ loved her!" and he screams, "No one loved her the way _I_ loved her!" so loudly it silences them all—their voices, the protests, the stupid, useless words of comfort, even his idiotic illusion that Elena could give him back what Bonnie took away; half of him, his future.

He knows she's watching him from up the stairs. He knows that he ruined what he thought was timeless and cosmic.

"I didn't mean it like that," he says, attempting to fix a tear too large, attempting to hold on to the last shred of denial that can save his sanity.

He turns to look at her, standing immobile on the stairs, fingers gripping the banister and blinking miserably as she raises her eyes to look at him.

"Yes, you did," she says with her sad voice. And it holds no accusation, no blame, like she knows it was inescapable for him.

No one looks surprised by his admission. He's been such an idiot.

It makes him laugh.

#

 **Six months after the linking spell.**

The air is fragrant with the scent of her shower cream. The delicate, twinkly smell of shea butter that reaches his brain burns the little sense he has, and it's too easy to see the texture of her honey-like skin under her clothes behind his dark, dilated pupils.

"You should cut down on your caffeine intake," he says, trying to trick his body into forgetting the subtle impulse drumming in every inch of his skin.

He's used to keeping his senses at bay but they slip from him sometimes, and everything amplifies—the blood thickening in his veins, the beating of his own heart in his ears. She has her back turned to him as she looks down to slip one foot into her open-toe ankle booties, but he can hear her mouth curving up into a grin.

Damon turns around, one hand rubbing the back of his head as she bends over to make sure the laces are tight enough. His hearing is so hypersensitive that he can hear the brushing of skin against skin when she moves and her tighs touch each other under her jersey skirt.

"I'll take a decaf, if it makes you feel better," she concedes with that patient tone he loathes. She's amused by the friendly protectiveness she reads in his words. It makes him feel safe, and it makes him feel annoyed and he takes out his phone from the pocket of his jeans to write a message to Alaric and tell him they should meet up for a beer. Or five.

Should he tell him the reason why he is suddenly eager to enjoy his dull company? The asshole would tell him _I told you so_ , though it's not _like that_ at all.

"You're wasting your time," he says, with no tact and more than a hint of edginess. "He's not right for you," he spits out, turning his head to look at her. She frowns at him through the mirror before going back to retouching the sheer tangerine lipstick on her tantalizing mouth, using the tip of her finger to make sure it doesn't smudge.

Actually he barely saw _him_ a couple of times – from afar, mind you, because she says he'd scare him away – but he has decided he doesn't like him because he breathes her same air and he probably fantasizes about her naked. Bonnie says he's nice, but Bonnie is used to mingling with psycho warlocks whose deepest dream is to wipe out their own families and kids that get a hard-on every time they meet a ghost, so he thinks hers is not a reliable opinion.

"I'm not planning on marrying him," she says, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear before walking past him towards the door, "I only want to spend some time together."

"You've spent enough," he rebuts, making her stop and turn to him with an annoyed look. Well, at least they are on the same page, now.

It' the third date, and everyone knows what that means. Damon knows.

Damon knows that she's been alone for months, now. Damon knows that she looks hatefully sexy. Damon knows that it's only a matter of time before someone manages to keep her attention enough to make him disappear from her line of sight.

"I'm the one that gets to decide who I want to spend time with and when to stop." She looks at him like she could pin him to the wall and give him a taste of her powers as a reminder. Too bad the only reaction the little display of dominance gets is making his member press behind the zipper of his jeans.

He bites his tongue, offering a dark grin as the metallic taste swells in his salivating mouth. If he speaks now it will all blow up in his face. He needs to let her go. Let her go and get a grip.

His silence seems to get to her and her eyes soften, suddenly regretful of her tone. "I know you're only looking out for me," she says, with a sweetened voice that seems to make her body tender, "But he's a nice guy, and I want to feel alive for a reason that's not the fact that I just killed an heretic or came back from the other side, you know. You don't have to worry. I know what I'm doing."

"I'm your friend," he says, needing to remind himself of his role in her life, of what he wants to be for her, of the only thing he _can_ be fore her. His voice is hoarse despite his will, and his hands grip her forearms gently, his fingertips rubbing her skin in a hypotonic motion. It's like he's accidentally pressed down on a secret button that has let the veil drop. There's a shift in the air and her mouth opens up like she's found herself surrounded by the possibility of them. Her lips look soft and smooth and warm. "I can help you feel alive," he says, his tone so low and rippling with intimacy that he can feel his own words slipping under her clothes, along her spine, "As your friend," he tries to correct himself. "I can," though he takes a step forward to feel the warmth radiating from her body and the breath that leaves her mouth hitting the base of his neck.

"Damon…" the way she says his name makes him swallow a groan. Her pupils are so large he can't see the green anymore. Her breath is labored, and from the way her eyes move he knows she's searching for all the reasons why she should take a step back and leave the room. A voice at the back of his mind is trying to tell him he should let her find those reasons, so that they can be saved, but he kills it.

Damon bends over her, his mouth subtly tracing the shape of her cheekbone. "Why waste your time and effort on a guy you will have to dump in the morning when I am here to help you with what you need?"

"You don't know what I need," she protests, though her trembling words are swallowed by the intoxicating scent of her arousal.

"I disagree," he says, his hands gripping her sides and making her shiver against him. She raises her eyes to his while he guides her against the wall at her back. Her legs slip open when he presses himself against her and her lashes tremble as her eyes close. He can catch the pink of her tongue behind her white teeth and his mouth waters.

"It's okay," he says, soothing the last doubts that keep them still and her silent. "This is the best solution," he says, one hand hooked behind her thigh, caressing her up until her skirt raises above her ass. "You don't need to force yourself into dating someone that obviously doesn't get you, or to feel guilty for leading him on." The tip of his index finger slides under the lace of her panties, can feel the ghost of her wetness and her hips sway at his subtle touch. "I can take care of your needs. I am your friend," he says, hypnotically, "And friends help each other".

"You are my friend," she repeats with a slight nod, like she's drunk on their closeness. Her cheeks flush and her eyes are bright with desire. He doesn't even know his hand is opening his jeans until he can feel the sweet rubbing of skin against the wet fabric of her panties.

"I am the _best—_ " Bonnie moans at the contact, pushing herself down against him, "—friend you'll ever have," he promises, kissing her mouth.

He needs to start with short pecks or the feel of her tongue will make him lose it, but then the shock is metabolized and his fingers probe her with all the gentleness his can muster in a moment such as this, when all of his muscles are overloaded with tension.

His is a meticulous search of her pleasure, which he conducts with fingers and mouth and all of his attention, like the world revolves around this. And so his lips trace the curve of her neck, tongue finding the piece of skin where her blood pumps harder. His fingers hook around the centre of her panties to drag them down, stroking himself against her wetness so that she knows what awaits her, so that she knows what she can have, what to desire, who's name to moan when she's looking for pleasure and she fingers herself frantically in the privacy of their tiny common bathroom.

"Let me…" he murmurs against her mouth, fixing his eyes onto hers while he sets a concupiscent rhythm for her.

Her body relaxes and his fingers slip easily into her warmth. She's soft like butter and smells so sweet he has trouble not falling on his knees and eating her sex like a starved man.

Bonnie's palm slides under his shirt, against the curve of his back. Her short fingernails sink into the skin, lightly scratching as her hands dive down, pushing the jeans out of the way, fingers gripping his ass as she lets her mouth fall open.

"Damon," she moans, her sex wetting him deliciously, his fingers slipping easily because of her matching desire.

"Damon," her voice calls him again, guiding the orgasm he's not ready to welcome. "Damon." And it's so abrupt that his stomach sinks brutally as he feels himself coming against his own hand, inside the shower stall clouded with steam.

His breath is hard and erratic, while Bonnie's voice informs him that she's back.

"Fuck," he curses himself under his breath for letting his horniness have the best of him, dirtying the one good thing he has in his life. If she knew what he was doing, what he was thinking about doing to her she'd probably cut his balls. With good reason.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm coming," he yells back at her, "No pun intended," he murmurs to himself, letting his head drop until the forehead is pressing against the tiles.

When he leaves the bathroom, dressed and more in control of his impulses, he sees Caroline's bags in a corner and Bonnie is already putting back her stuff. He sits down choosing to keep his back to her. He feels ashamed. He's done the worse thing possible, and he feels ashamed because he jerked off thinking of his beautiful, sexy, no-nonsense best friend.

"You seem really sad at the prospect of me leaving," he says, sarcastically, feeling the bite of disappointment at having her already pushing away his stuff like it's useless and unwanted.

"You're not leaving the country," she reminds him, "Alaric needs you."

"And an independent, strong witch like you doesn't. I'm not offended."

He can hear her sigh, counts in his head the seconds until she will admit that she is going to miss him. She doesn't, but he can feel the weight of her against his back and her arms around his neck.

She smells good, and he lets one hand wrap around her elbow.

"Are you trying to strangle me?" he asks, trying to sound playful and failing.

"I might," she piques, smiling against his ear.

It's good that he has a good excuse to leave her, a good excuse to tear himself from her. Before it's too late. He knows now that he needs to stay away, stop breathing her in like she's the very air he needs, stop learning her habits and watching her and hating her dates and thinking of her and desiring her like the last hope he's got.

"Maybe you should," he admits, with a grin that his eyes can't match and she can't see.


	6. Chapter 6

**Five weeks after Elena's return (and Bonnie's death).**

In the end, coming back from the dead results in afternoons on the porch, vitamin drinks, and the occasional aspirin for her headaches, which are less and less frequent.

In movies, it's way more exciting and eventful. The female lead opens her eyes and rediscovers the world, her own value, and the great love of her life. She's only rediscovered her neighborhood, the levels of restlessness she can reach, and the usefulness of a romance novel when your own social life is a flat line on a monitor. No pun intended.

She turns another page and pushes a strand of hair behind her ear when she hears the steps on the porch and raises her eyes. He's smiling at her with his tempting mouth and blue eyes. He leans back against the wood railing and crosses his feet at the ankles. She can see the skin of his knees trough the slit of his ripped jeans and the fists balled in the pockets of his black leather jacket.

"Did they hire you as decoration?" he asks, "Because you make a really nice one. I'll double whatever they offered you."

Bonnie smiles at his flirtation, feeling rather fortunate. She's caught the eye of the most handsome boy she's ever met, at least the most handsome one she's ever met since she went to live with her mom. She supposes he's set the bar quite high. It is flattering, even when she gets nasty looks from the girls in her neighborhood.

"You can't afford someone like me," she says lowering her eyes to the page.

"That's a challenge I can't wait to take on," he says, plopping himself down onto the swing, making it move under his weight.

Bonnie can't help the grin curving her mouth and she looks at him without saying a word. There's some tension in the air, which is fragrant with the approaching spring, and she can feel it bubbling up in her veins. Who knows, maybe her movie is starting, right now, with the soundtrack offered by the oiled up chains of the swing they're sitting on. Bonnie takes her time to observe his lineaments, the softness of a mouth she wouldn't mind kissing, his shaved jaw and the clear blue of his eyes. They're beautiful, but they're the _wrong_ shade.

The thought puts her off, breaks the moment bitterly, the way a scorned lover would, and the smile gracing Nathan's face falters as he feels the sudden distance between them.

"Are you feeling okay?" he asks, trying to pinpoint the cause of the change between them. She'd like to be able to tell what's just happened, why his beautiful eyes made her so upset. There's a sinking feeling in the middle of her chest, like someone has just walked all over her only hope, but it's stupid and it doesn't make sense and she tries to smile.

"I think I'm a bit tired," she says, letting her voice soften.

"You've been out of the hospital for barely two weeks, I think you're entitled to be egoist with your time," he says, "It keeps the tension high," he adds, leaning into her to murmur the last words.

"Does this seductive act usually work?" she asks, leaning into him herself, using his same tone, just a few inches between them.

"Do you find it seductive?" he asks back without batting a lash. She knows part of him is hoping she'll give in now and let him kiss her – maybe do it herself – but it is funnier to resist him. Actually, it does seem less problematic than she thought.

Bonnie turns her face and covers her mouth to yawn.

"I won't take it personally, if that's what you're fearing," he says ironically, standing while she grabs the pillow pressed at her side and slides her feet into her new slippers. Everything she owns is new, first and foremost her relationships in this little town.

She saw a few pictures and she knows she came here with her family when she was a child, but she can't remember her life two months ago, let alone a childhood that doesn't really seem worth remembering. Results of an accident that left her dead for two minutes before the paramedics managed to force her heart to beat again.

Since then, her life has been the protectiveness of a mother that claims she wants to make up for the time lost and protect her.

"Thanks, I'm very relieved," she answers with a victorious grin before turning her back on him to go inside, "I'll see you," she adds.

"Oh, that you will do," he calls after her.

Pushing back the little curtain of the window on top of the kitchen sink she watches him leave her porch, the last rays of sun glisten on his brown hair as he waves to a child after kicking the ball that flew over the picket fence around his home.

Bonnie sighs before going up to her bedroom, ignoring the papers her mother left on her nightstand. She is okay with making up for the lost time, but switching colleges to stay close is maybe taking it too far. The doctor told them she should regain her memories on her own, let them come back to her on their own time, but she is itching to go and find out what kind of person she was, what kind of life she was making for herself.

Her mother told her she didn't have many friends, let it slip that her best friend passed away only a few months ago and so she stopped pushing for answers. Any other friend she might have had would have tried to contact her already. It is hardly possible they don't know she has a mother, after all.

But it still doesn't make sense to turn her back on a past she knows nothing about. And she wonders whose shoulders she wrapped her arms around at night when she dreams and she can't see his face, when she dreams only to wake up sad.

She wakes up sad and tries to lift her mood with a good breakfast but she's frustrated with anything she makes, unless it's pancakes, it turns out. Maybe it was her comfort food growing up. Her mom told her she loved her grandmother's apple crisps as a child, so it must be something she picked on after she left.

She wonders if there's someone in the world that knows her, that knows why she has a scar on her stomach and a shade of blue that's impossible to find. Bonnie takes the pillow from under her head and uses it to cover her face. It still smells frustratingly new and she hears her mother open the door to inform her that "Dinner is on the table." It's probably take-away, considering that her mom is not the most expert cook of her acquaintance. Not that she has that many at the moment.

Bonnie just makes a sound that comes from the back of her throat and is further muffled by the pillow she's using to hide herself.

"Com'on Bonnie, you have three seconds," her mom says before closing the door again.

Bonnie is distracted, maybe already half asleep, but the words bounce on her brain like a kid jumping on a bed despite instructions and three seconds, three seconds, three seconds. _Do you know how long three seconds are in a life or death situation?_

He turns around in the warm light of the lamp, face so perfectly chiseled she wants to roll her eyes at it. Bonnie pushes the pillow away, letting it hit the ground softly, and sits up so fast her head spins for a moment. His hair is ruffled and his look is impertinent and annoyed and he's frustratingly spitting out _that you're my best friend and if something ever happened to you I would lose my mind_ , with such violence she can feel the words cut a hole in her so deep the smug bastard is going to hide in there for the rest of her life - never keeping quiet, disapproving of the people she thinks she is gonna kiss, laughing about the imperfect shades of blue in the world, drawing smiles with whipped cream to annoy her enough that she won't have time to be sad.

"Damon…" she breathes his name like she just discovered the force that makes the earth turn.

 _You're stuck with me, too._

 _#_

 **Seven months after the linking spell.**

She recognizes his step, the way he carries himself through the rabble of students in the corridors of Whitmore College and Bonnie presses her book to her side and slides in between the spaces to rush up to him.

"Hey, stranger," she calls, making him turn to her. "This is a curve ball I'm throwing at you, a very hard question, but you can do it. I believe in you, just concentrate," she says, making him curve his eyebrow as he looks quizzically at her.

"Alright, shoot," he says, crossing his arms over his chest.

"Who aced her chemistry test today and got _perfect_ score?" she asks, trying to keep her cool. She worked really hard to get this result, barely coming up for air for two weeks, and now it feels good to be able to enjoy her success.

"How long do I have to answer your question?" he asks, "Also, is this a multiple-choice test? Because as you _don't_ know for yourself, I do better with _orals_ " he explains, before offering the most fake innocent expression he has in his repertoire.

Bonnie rolls her eyes but can't stop smiling at his stupid flirting. It feels warm to be at the receiving end of his idiocy once again, she missed that horribly though she cannot tell him that without his ego inflating even more than usual.

"I know you are slow on the thinking since all your blood usually flows south," she says, teasing him. He grins with a look that's half proud for her fast wit, half amused for how easily she can fall into step with his craziness. "So, while you try to work on the right answer I'll buy you a drink so we can celebrate," she continues, "I suppose I owe you since you left me alone enough to make me study in peace."

"I live _not_ to serve," he says, his grin falters before he takes a small bow, "But I have to decline the kind invitation," he adds, soon after.

"Oh, you busy?" she asks, trying to hide her disappointment. She heard from him through messages for two weeks and saw him twice for a total of barely an hour. It's silly of her to count the minutes and feel frustrated. It's not like they have a monthly quota to fill or something, but he's her best friend and though there's the occasional moment in which they seem to fit so well – with the way words are not necessary but at the same time they can tell each other anything – she feels like there's a growing distance between them which she can't stop from betting bigger and bigger.

"Yeah, sort of," he manages. It's a vague answer, the one he gives when he's done something that will piss her off. It would be better than just thinking that he grew tired of her constant presence in his life, that he'd rather spend time with Alaric, but he didn't come for her, it seems.

"Is it a girl?" she asks. "It's okay if it is, you know Elena wants you to live your life," she adds, trying to sound supportive.

Damon seems thrown off by her words and he tries to joke, "What girl? You know you're the only one," and for a moment it lights a little spark in her - it's one of those moments when the connection between them is so palpable she can see the string that links them to each other – yet he seems eager to break it off. "Something I should remedy soon before my reputation is permanently put down."

Maybe she's just being paranoid, because clearly he is kidding, as usual, but it feels like he's trying to cut her off on purpose, "Right," and it stings.

"After this you'll owe me two drinks," he adds before she can leave.

"What for?"

"For one, I left you alone and you scored a perfect grade," he says raising a finger to list the things she owes him for, "Which, I commend you for, since I am the brain of the duo-"

"You're what?" she asks, amused by his ridiculous self-confidence.

"And the looks," he adds, "And the arm," he adds again. "Let's admit it. I keep you around out of the goodness of my heart."

"How generous," she comments flatly.

"And second, I'm leaving you alone so that you can find yourself a boyfriend that won't be scared off by my immense charm," he explains, "which, let's face it, will still happen the very moment that he sees me, but at least you'll get a chance to cop a feel first."

"I better go," she says, giving him a nasty look, "I feel my standards in men lowering by the second. I wonder why," she says turning around to walk away. How can one person be so self-centered and conceited? A little laugh escapes her lips as she goes and she can hear him yelling triumphantly after her, "I heard that, you adore me!"

Bonnie shakes her head amused, and just a tiny bit annoyed with herself for not resisting long enough to give him the satisfaction of knowing that she likes his stupid sense of humor. Still, she misses him.

She misses the time spent together watching TV and sharing a drink and the events of the day or not speaking at all. Just his body near hers fills the space and a place inside her chest that feels like quicksand whenever he's not near. And it bugs her, all his talking about her finding herself a boyfriend, because while she complained about his scaring away every potential date she had, it was one thing is for her to say it and another thing entirely for him to say it.

Damon is her best friend but he's still got his little egoisms and he hates to share anything. The fact that he's so eager to give her space, to let her be someone else's wounds her. Maybe she's getting too attached, maybe she's becoming troublesome and bothersome to him, or maybe he heard her heartbeat and saw the way she catches herself staring at his stupid perfect face and realized that she got confused. That she needs space and boundaries and to remember that he is her best friend, her best friend's boyfriend, dedicated to a fault, ready to go celibate for the next sixty years because Elena is the one and only in his heart.

Maybe her acting all mature and breezy did not fool him. And it's not something she can blame on him, because his intentions and his feelings have always been clear, flaunted for everyone to see, and she thought she was safe.

The possibility of her feelings being so obvious makes her feel like dying and she finds herself walking out faster to breathe fresh air again. She's just stepped out when her phone starts vibrating in her pocket, it actually only adds to her crumbling securities.

"What?" she asks, unwilling to disguise her upset mood.

"In case you're wondering, no, your tone doesn't sound particularly friendly, but I won't take it to heart," the British inflection in his voice does not make him more likeable but he's a distraction as good as another, she supposes, so she doesn't hang up on him immediately like she would have done in another occasion, "be reassured, it doesn't take away from your allure."

"Are you about to take a dirt nap and you need my help?" she asks, because second-guessing Enzo's intentions is always the safest way to proceed. "Because I, for one, would like to see that."

"As preposterous as it might seem I am just calling to enjoy your _charming_ company," he says, making her stop in her steps, incredulous.

"Yeah, right. Your motivation are always harmless," she replies, words dripping with sarcasm, "I am your favorite person and you want to chit chat with me over a beer."

"I do have better taste in alcoholic beverages," he corrects her in a conversational tone, "But, simply put, you're the only person I know worth spending time with that has a knack for bonding with homicidal creatures and…. I'm feeling quite alone."

"It's not my problem," she replies wary but not unkindly.

"No, it's not," Enzo agrees.

The silence that stretches between them is tense but not uncomfortable and she's alone, too, with feelings she intends to bury and let die fast, and she can take him if it turns out to be another of his tricks.

Bonnie sighs, kicking herself mentally while her mouth forms the words, "Where are you?"

 _On a tree in the garden I carved your name_  
 _In a word that spelled desire_  
 _Like an ocean deep where the waters heaving, heaving_  
 _And your love pours down like a waterfall_  
 _And I can't escape the tide_  
 _Here's my hand baby, take it or leave it, l_

 _leave it_

_#_

 **Note:** The song at the end of this chapter is "Time" by Mikky Ekko.


	7. Chapter 7

**Six Weeks after Elena's return (and Bonnie's death)**

She's staring at her painted nails. Turquoise doesn't look so bad on her but it's not the reason why she can't stop looking at them. There's something familiar in this. She's precise and fast and she knows she did this many times before, for someone else, too.

She tries to pick hard at a memory buried under her general confusion, beyond that dense mist hiding her past from her, but it is impossible to drag out and it's exhausting. She tried this before, stopping dead in the middle of an aisle at the mall because a girl passed her by and she smelled familiar. She remembers sitting in a quiet corner, moving her lips without emitting any sound while she tried to put together a name, picture a face, but nothing came.

"They look nice," her mom says, looking down at her hands while she sits at the table drumming her fingers on the dark wood.

"You want me to paint yours, too?" she proposes, trying to make it look like an innocent offer. A part of her hopes that painting her nails will help her reacquire the feeling, put together the puzzle enough to steal a glance at the girl hiding in the mists of her mind.

Her mom looks genuinely touched by her offer and Bonnie feels a pang of guilt at that, but she seems unwilling to give her any kind of information on her past–because the doctor says she must do it alone, because it would be too stressful, because there seems to be way too many reasons for her to stay away from the path she left–and so she must do this on her own, in whatever way.

"I'd like that," Abby says, sitting in front of her and putting her hands flat on the surface of the table. The feeling of her mom's hand in hers never wakes any memory, never feels familiar and it's awkward but Bonnie just concentrates on her little task.

"You're really good at this," her mom says.

"Yeah, I think I must have done this a lot. For my best friend, maybe," Bonnie says, stealing a look at the woman's face trying to catch what she'll give away. There's only a calm smile on her face, melancholic maybe, but transparent. In Bonnie's mind there's a lot of blue and Damon's voice calling her his best friend. She doesn't suppose it was his nails she painted, unless he was gay. Did she have one of those gay best friends that advised her on what made her look fat and chatted with her about the mottes boys on campus?

"Probably. Girls have a habit of relying on these kinds of things to raise their mood and feel pretty. It a good thing." she says, keeping her words vague; and yet, it must mean her best friend was clearly female.

Abby falls silent again and it doesn't feel right. Bonnie thinks she should be talking, blabbering about something without coming up for air. Caroline would not shut up to the point that her hands would tremble with the unreleased energy and Bonnie had to do her best to not paint the skin.

Her hand stops and a drop of the quick-dry polish coagulates on her mom nail.

"I wanna call Caroline," she says, raising her eyes on a face that freezes.

Her mom is not breathing and she puts up a smile as fast as she can as she tells her, "I don't have her number but I can look for it if you want." There's something she's hiding, it shows through the cracks in her expression, in the way her eyes escape her every now and then. She's giving in too easily and yet not at all.

"Do you really feel ready for this? There are so many things you don't know. Bad things that happened to you, and I just wanna protect you," she explains.

"Bad things happen," Bonnie says, "People die and leave. You left me, too, didn't you?"

"I did, and I know it's too little, but it's not distance that lessens love."

In a way Bonnie knows this, for there's a shadow twirling around her heart—an insolent, cheeky presence, a constant reminder of something that still lives in her. A creature clinging to the walls of her soul like ivy.

"Then you know why I need to see my friends," she says and she knows she's lying. There's a name she wants to spit out and hold, a shade of blue covering her like a wave, before pulling back to the sea.

"They're not good for you, honey," Abby tries to persuade her and it just rubs her the wrong way. She's old enough to decide on her own, and she was never there to offer a shelter, some comfort, so what makes her think she's entitled to it, now?

"What would you know about it?" she asks, barely controlling her irritation.

"Clam down, Bonnie. You're not supposed to put yourself under stress, you heard the doc—"

"I heard it all. What I didn't hear, yet, is the truth!" she yells, trying to cover the motherly tone that suddenly grates on her nerves. And the little bottle of nail polish explodes on the table making her jump and look wide-eyed at the colored puddle on the table.

"I did that," she says, sounding not as scared she should be, like there's a part of her that already knew.

"Don't panic," her mom says, raising her hands in the air like she wants to still it all.

"I'm not panicking," Bonnie replies, frustrated as she manages to control her breathing, "But I _should_ be panicking. Anyone else would be panicking right now." Her heart is beating so fast she's afraid is going to break her chest and kill her on the spot but she's caught on something, on something that can drag her out of the mist and she intends to make it. Tear the veil like she's ripping a Band-Aid, and once the blow is absorbed she will be able to finally move on and stop being ordered around like a sick child.

"I did that. I can do this, make things explode. Right? And you know because you're not panicking either. You _know_ it."

"Yes—"

"I'm a witch, and so is every woman in our bloodline. And Caroline is my friend. And she is… She is…" She can't find that piece of information and it angers her, because if she lets it go, now, it might never come back to her. "What is she? Tell me, what is she?" she yells again.

"A vampire," her mom says unwillingly.

"A vampire, yes." Bonnie nods, accepting the fact though it still makes little sense. She knows it to be the truth and she'll let her brain absorb it as slowly as it needs while she digs out everything she can.

"Since… _they_ came back to Mystic Falls things have been so hard for you. You lost your grandmother, your dad, and your best friends because of them and if you'd let yourself move on from that dark past I know you could be happy."

"I wasn't?" she asks, wondering herself. From the look of it her life was one funeral after the other.

"Not really," she says, and she sound sincere about it. Bonnie wants to deny it only to spite her but she can't be sure.

"Then why didn't I leave?"

"Because you're good. You're good and loyal and took it upon yourself to defend the town you grew up in."

"You make it sound like I'm some sort of hero."

"You are," she smiles, "But heroes die and you died one too many times."

"What does that mean?"

Her mom reaches out, taking her hands in hers. "Bonnie, think of yourself just this once," she begs, "You need to."

"What about Caroline?" she asks.

"She's strong, she's immortal, and she has people that love her. If you go back, there's only danger and death waiting for you; and, even if you should survive long enough to see wrinkles on your face, you'll have to see the distance between you and your friends grow larger and larger. They'll go on with their eternity and you'll feel left behind, and one day you'll realize that you sacrificed everything for someone that could never do the same for you because you're the only one that still has a life to sacrifice."

Bonnie looks away, unable to look ahead at the lonely future Abby painted for her. The room smells like formaldehyde and it makes her eyes burn.

"Can't we just live here?" her mom asks, her tone gentle to not upset her more "Make up for the time we lost? I know it was my fault but if you'll let me I'll try and be a good mom for you. We can be a family, again."

She leans forward and her arms slip around her, rocking her slowly into a hug. Bonnie lets her chin rest on her shoulder. "Maybe you're right," she concedes, wishing for a moment she could hide and stop thinking so hard, stop wanting so bad something she can't even name. It's tiring and lonely and she doesn't want to feel lonely anymore.

"Oh, Bonnie."

"Mom…"she begins, her breathing uneven and her eyes glossy.

"Yes, honey?"

Her voice almost breaks with the unnamed emotion his name alone carries, "What about Damon?" but her mother tear herself away from their embrace like she's just been spit in the face. Her abrupt reaction seem to turn a switch inside Bonnie and the quiet sadness lingering on her becomes distrust, ready to bloom into full anger.

"So, this is about Damon," her mother says, standing from the chair and walking behind it, putting some distance between them as she looks at her daughter like she's about to forbid her from dating the troublesome boy from school.

"I don't know," Bonnie replies, wary, "Is it? Because suddenly it seems like all your reasons for keeping me away from my old life are a bunch of crap while it just boils down to the fact that you don't like him."

"Of course I don't like him! I _loathe_ him. He's the reason your life was destroyed in the first place!" her mother admonished her. "He made me like this!" she says, pointing a finger in the middle of her own chest. And maybe Bonnie puts two and two together, or maybe things are just coming back to the surface like treasures floating on top of a turbid sea, but she knows her mother is a vampire. She knows she found a balance in this new life that never contemplated her.

"He is my _friend."_

Abby snickers, shaking her head and crossing her arms under her breast. "Right. He's a friend, only a friend, which is why you still have to ask or even _remember_ about your boyfriend, or why you seem to have a certain type."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Bonnie tries to protest, and that's exactly the problem. Because she doesn't know who her boyfriend is, and it never occurred to her that there could be someone that important in her life. Damon is the first thing that came back to her after the accident, and Damon is the reason why she can't let go.

"The blue-eyed boy you flirt with. Sweetie… it's so painfully obvious, it makes me cringe every time. It's like you were looking for him even when you didn't remember him." It make sense now, her desire to be liked by him crashing against a wrong shade of blue, and the frustration she feels sometimes when he touches her hand or her face and it doesn't feel quite right. "But at least this boy is human, at least he likes you, while Damon, on the other hand, is just using you."

"You should have been around to know that," Bonnie replies, bitterly, "Or what I feel for Damon," she states, trying to sound calm and unaffected by her opinion.

"Damon Salvatore is a selfish son of a bitch who is waiting around for you to die so that his girlfriend can wake up from a lifelong coma, and you can call it friendship all you want but a mother knows. Even a bad one like me."

"What?" she asks suddenly unsure, the peaceful face of a sleeping Elena behind her eyes. "What do you know?"

"That you love him," her mother answers quietly, "And that that love is going to break you."

 **Nine months after the linking spell.**

Enzo called her again, and because he didn't try any murderous tricks on her the first time, she accepted his second invitation with less reluctance as a prize to reinforce his good behavior, like she would have done with a dog in training.

He smells nicer than a dog, she must admit, and sometimes his accent and his trailing voice seem to caress her in all the right places.

Enzo can be funny, if he chooses to be, and once or twice he looks at her in a way she likes.

It's nothing more than that, really. Damon is always on the verge of leaving whenever he's around her, like there's a clock in his mind counting the minutes. Sometimes it leaves her frustrated, sometimes it leaves her grateful. She's still working on her stupid feelings.

It's nobody's fault, really. She never had a male best friend. It's truly not the same. Not Elena nor Caroline ever made her quiver with the intimacy of their whispered confidences, and looking at them from across her side of the bed never made her want to melt against their chest.

There is a psychological process she always forgets the name of, where a girl shortly develops feelings for the partner of their closest friends in the unconscious attempt to accept and support and see the good in the relationship their friend is entrusting their heart into. She thinks this is what's happening to her. She wishes, so badly, that this is what's happening to her that sometimes she finds herself holding her breath and waiting for the feeling to stop, to finally die down, leaving her free of any guilt, of any shameful desire.

It never happens, but when Enzo offers his flirty smile, when he talks with his smooth, deep tone, when he flirts without a purpose, she can swear it was all in her mind.

Bonnie realizes Enzo's flirting does have a purpose when he changes the location for their ritual beer, and the beer actually becomes a red wine that costs around 150 bucks per glass. It takes Bonnie five minutes to decide she's not gonna do this, that she's not going to indulge him. "Listen Enzo, this is nice but I don't think—" but the moments she speaks to let him down gently she catches the brief movement of his Adam's apple, the tense traits on such a handsome face and she recognizes the sincere fear of rejection. It makes him appear suddenly real.

"What?" he asks, behind his renewed mask of nonchalance, "What don't you think?" and he stares at her unblinkingly so that she won't disappear from his sight.

It warms up something inside. There's a part of her that wants to know what else she can uncover about him, what terribly human secret she can find out about him. She wants to touch him and find the little button that will make the walls go down, that will make his marble skin become flesh again, so she takes a breath and relaxes in her seat, pulling a strand of hair behind her ear.

"I don't think I should drink on an empty stomach," she says, making him smile despite his attempt to keep his cool. Enzo raises his hand and signals the waitress to come over. He asks for a menu, his manners so charming the waitress smiles like he's just got on his knee to ask for her hand.

Bonnie doesn't know how she ended up on a date with Enzo St. John but it feels so nice she can even ignore her phone ringing in her purse.

Yet, it stills doesn't sink in. The morning after, she keeps thinking back to their date and it feels like something that happened to someone else. It's strange, and enticing. And because he didn't ask to see her again she can't help but wonder if he wants to, if maybe his fascination with her is over and he decided she's not his type after all.

She shouldn't be surprised. She met many vampires and not one looked at her twice unless they wanted her powers. It was always Elena, and she was never jealous because she loved her too much to be. But now there are moments when she resents her for going away and leaving her here to see all Damon's weakness, all his humanity, that heart that could never die despite all his effort. It's not her place to see his good, not her place to understand his bad. It's not her place to love it all.

"You didn't answer your phone," Damon says as she leaves her door room, making her jump. Her heart starts hammering behind her ribcage and she presses a hand against her chest. She can tell herself that the way it races is only because he scared the shit out of her.

"And good morning to you, Damon," she says, ignoring his words. A part of her wants to tell him she was on a romantic date with a dark creature, that she does not attract the average Joe only, that even if he'll never see her that way, someone else does, and he's as powerful and idiotic as he is, and wears leather just as well.

Another part wants to bury this dirty little secret and is just wishing really hard that her blush won't give her away. After all, she doesn't think it will happen, again. Enzo is not really interested, and she is too smart to be interested, and Damon is only her friend. They are as close as brother and sister and soon she'll realize it was all a misconstruction of him and she is _so_ not interested, and so she has no reason to want him to regret his inability to see her under a different light.

She walks ahead and he follows.

"I called you, last night," he explains, and he's next to her in one single stride. She hates his long legs.

"Was it important?"

"Of course it was. It was a call from me."

"Right," she agrees with an amused grin.

"I came by but I didn't find you. Where were you?"

"Not here," she answers briefly, knowing it will only serve to spur his curiosity. He can be such a child.

"Why are you being secretive?"

"I'm not being secretive," she answers, unnerved, "I'm being late. Damon, I really have to go to class."

"You're seeing some guy," his voice sounds almost accusatory, and she slips through the crowd of students hoping to lose him but Damon is at her heels.

"It's not some guy,"

"So, you admit it. There _is_ someone…someone that doesn't bring you coffee in bed because he's not allowed into your bed so he has to leave it at the door, which is reasonable and level-headed of you. In fact, I think you should keep going like this. I mean, we all know guys lose interest once you let them have—"

"What?" She stops in the middle of the hallway and he turns on his heels to face her once again.

"Are you shocked now? You can't tell me this is not old news. We're a bunch of perv—"

"No, not that. I know that. My best friend is the living manifesto of _that_." She says, getting angry at his obviousness. "I'm talking about the coffee part."

"That he's not allowed to get close to your bed so he left it at the door?" he asks.

"Where is it?"

"It was cold already and a latte macchiato. You don't even like latte macchiato so I threw it away."

"Who gave you the right to?" she asks, trying to keep her voice down so they won't make a scene. A girl passing them by turned towards them, probably taking their discussion for a lover's quarrel. Oh, if she only knew how far from the truth she was.

"I know you take your daily caffeine dose very seriously, so we can go to the cafeteria now and I will—"

"I don't want to go to the cafeteria with you, and you don't get to throw away things that are mine—"

Damon raises both hands in an attempt to sooth her anger, but she missed those hands, and she hates those hands, and he has no right to appear and ruin it all for her.

"You can do so well without me that you disappear for days, then when the mood strikes you decide I should be waiting for you to come around. Well, it doesn't work like that—"

Suddenly, he's angry, too…at the fact that she lightly say that he can do without her when half the time he's awake, all he can think about it's her pink lips pressed against his wrist, and stupidly wonder how they would feel under his mouth if only she wasn't his best friend, his own breathing reminder of someone waiting for him at the end of a long nap. If only giving in to this unspeakable desire wouldn't mean irremediably screwing up the only good thing he's ever had.

"You said you needed to study. I was practically the interruption to your organized routine," he protests. Before they went to hell and back together, in the literal fashion, he couldn't care less about the effects of his actions on her life. Yes, her Grams died, but everyone has to croak sooner or later; and yes, he turned her mom into a vampire so what? No wrinkles, no humanity, that's kind of a good thing actually. She lost her mother way before that, anyway. Not his fault the woman couldn't stick around. And that little thing about Silas killing her father was a sad coincidence he has nothing to do with. This was always his version, not that he cared to defend himself. But now that she's the one to hear his secrets and _cherish_ them, now that she _smiles_ when she sees him – the real kind, all white teeth and plump lips and a light in her eyes like there's something good about him – and the first thing she tells him is not to go die away from her, and he feels like crap. He took anything he could from her, and there's more he wants, _so much more_ he wants, and she cannot imagine the half of it. If she did, she would be disgusted. "You said that I needed to learn boundaries, and I did, didn't I?" He only comes to her when he feels like he can manage himself, and when his guard start to slip and his hands start to itch to touch her, he rushes away so that what they have will be untainted and he'll remember, at some point, the girl he loves, the girl he's waiting for. It's exhausting and the best he can do and she should appreciate that instead of doubting him. "You said Alaric needed me so I played the good buddy, like _you_ wanted. I've let you have your space, like _you_ wanted."

And because he's wrong, and all she wanted was for him to refuse to leave her side, she just wants to hurt him. "You don't know what I want because you never asked me!" she protests, wondering what she would say if he truly did, wondering if she would have the guts to admit her feelings if he only posed that question, "Well, a latte macchiato is exactly what I wanted," she replies. "That guy is exactly what I want."

Somewhere in the corner of her mind a reasonable voice is telling her that this is a stupid discussion, that she didn't really mean it, that her anger won't last – that it never lasts anymore with him – but she likes to hold on to it, likes to think this is the last straw and her wandering heart will stop following him around.

Bonnie wants to say that she's sorry, that she knows he didn't behave like an ass on purpose, that she really missed him after all. Only, Enzo remembered how she takes her coffee and he didn't, and it kinda broke her heart. And if she doesn't get mad she'll probably won't have a reason not to cry.

Damon nods, he has no smart remarks to offer, no joke to come out on top, to lessen up the tension. He turns on his heels and walks away, his step slower than usual. Bonnie is so angry and disappointed she can barely move, and for a few seconds, her body goes rigid.

His legs might be longer but she is quick to catch up to him. All the while in her mind, someone calls her _stupid, stupid_ , but she can't let him go like this, cannot help but run back to him, every time.

"You still own me a coffee," she yells, making him stop. "You behaved like an ass," she decides, because he's not supposed to stay away even if she asks him to; because, if she can't count on his pigheadedness than what is she supposed to do?

"And that's news?" he asks.

Bonnie rolls her eyes and he grins at that. They click together, like they did before, like they always did, and nothing's changed.

"Say you're sorry," she says.

"What am I? A trained parrot?"

"I'm your best-friend," she reminds him, making him smile, "and I'm telling you, it's in your best interests to say, ' _I'm sorry, Bonnie.'_ "

"I'm sorry, Bonnie." he says, readily.

" _I was an idiot_ ," she suggests.

"I agree," he replies, ignoring her hint entirely, "But I forgive you," he adds, hooking her neck with his arm to hold her closer.

He's too stupid and too funny for her to be able to stay angry at him for long. It would hurt her pride if she was able to care, but what she feels covers her eyes, like two hands she can always recognize.

 _You flick your mane and click your fingers again_ _  
And from your back you call my name  
And like a fool I run right back to you  
And dance along to your latest tune_

 _And when the lands slides_ _  
And when the planets die  
That's when I come back  
When I come back to you_

 _#_

 **Note:** The song I used in this chapter is "Back to you" by Brett Anderson feat. Emanuelle.


	8. Chapter 8

**Eleven weeks after Elena's return (and Bonnie's death)**

She thinks one of these days she'll go back and take a peek at her old life, like a TV show she's not sure she wants to follow anymore. Her mom would like for her to change channels, go from the American Horror Story to some family-oriented program.

Sometimes she thinks Abby is making an effort, trying to fit herself into her life, or what has looked like her life in the two months after her accident. Sometimes she thinks Abby is playing grown-up, trying to imitate the average housewives she sees in every frozen dish commercial. In both cases, she supposes, she's doing her best and she needs to recognize that.

More than once, Bonnie outlines a road trip in her mind, trying to hypothesize how many hours it would take her, how many rest stops she would need before arriving home, trying to envision her friends welcoming her back. Caroline would be all hyped up and would just drown her in words and suffocate her in her arms. Stefan would probably need to peel her away to hug her himself. Stefan gives the most comfortable, tender hugs. That she remembers clearly.

Sometimes she thinks of Enzo, of his warm eyes on her and the way his callous fingers plucked the cords of a guitar for her, of the way he could make a mockery of himself just to have her laugh. She wants to tell him she's grateful for that. She wants to touch him and shiver in anticipation.

She tries not to think about Damon's reaction at seeing her. She tries not to build any expectation, not to be swept up by any warm, vibrant, borderline-romantic fantasy. Did he look for her? Did he do something horrible because he needed to pour out his frustration when he couldn't find her?

Did he miss her?

She knows him. Maybe she's still missing some parts of their history – though bits and pieces came back to her each day, during the last weeks – but she knows him, and he can't possibly have felt indifferent to her disappearance. He doesn't know what it is to feel indifferent. Damon is not one for half measures. He burns from hate or he burns for love but there is no middle ground with him. And she remembers him letting her bully him into watching The Bodyguard, again, just as soon as the end credits were over. She remembers him hiding the crosswords page so that no one else could fill them but her. She remembers an infinite trail of details that wake her up during the night and have her rushing off the bed like she'd find him in the room next to hers, before remembering that she can't, that she is in a different state, in a different life, one that seems much colder in the night.

One night, she walks all the way down the stairs, bare feet making a soft sound on the wood of the parquet. A shiver runs through her when her hand wraps around the knob but it's not the chill from her skimpy pajamas. It's the possibility of him; but most of all, it's her mother's words and the melancholy of a hole they could fill together.

Her mom abandoned her when she was seven. She came back from school and found the table set and a plate with turkey and broccoli waiting for her. She got rid of the broccoli and ate only the turkey. Then she waited for her to come back because she really wanted to tell her about her day.

In the months that came after she remembers blaming herself, because maybe if she'd eaten the broccoli her mom wouldn't have left. Maybe if she hadn't been so disobedient she would have stayed.

From then on, she always ate her vegetables first, and then looked back at the front door that did not open.

Now what holds her back – other than that creeping fear of things untold and denied – is that she doesn't want to leave her mother the way she was left, not after a whole childhood spent waiting to have a second chance at being the daughter she wanted so much to be. So she doesn't turn the knob, just rests her forehead against the little curtain covering the glass and takes a breath, before going up the stairs and slipping into her mother's bedroom.

Abby doesn't speak but Bonnie knows she's awake when she pulls the blanket higher to her chin and moves back a strand of hair from her forehead. For a moment, Bonnie pretends she's five years old again and her mom just came back home later than usual. She lets her anger fall away to enjoy the peaceful instant, tells herself that it's alright, that everything will be alright, one way or the other.

In the morning Abby is trying not to look too smug about that fact that she didn't burn her scrambled eggs when Bonnie looks down to the plate she placed in front of her. She's absently toying with the halved tomatoes when her mom interrupts the train of her thoughts.

"Eat the eggs first, or they will get cold," she tells her, distractedly. And suddenly it's like something clicks inside of her.

"I don't know if I'm in the mood for tomatoes this morning," she says, studying her mother's reaction, almost holding her breath.

The woman cracks a smile, sipping on her coffee with a shrug, "That's fine, Bonnie. You can just eat the eggs, if you like."

The world won't crumble down if she doesn't eat her veggies. She won't go to hell if she doesn't lay down her life for the dog of her unpleasant neighbor. She's not a horrible person if she sometimes wishes to be someone's first thought. Humanity won't perish if she loves someone everyone thinks she shouldn't, and it's not always her fault if things go bad because sometimes life sucks and that's all. Bonnie feels a bit like crying but she feels also fine, in a way she hasn't for a very long time.

"Mom, about today's check-up—" she starts when she's sure her voice isn't going to crack at a most inopportune moment.

"Yes?"

"I think I need to go alone," she says.

Abby puts down her cup with a sense of seriousness, but for how long they've been apart she knows this about her daughter—that she needs to do what she needs to do and no screaming will stop her. It runs in the family, after all. Didn't she do the same when she abandoned her?

"Are you sure? It's only been two months since your accident, and I don't think it's safe," she explains, "You could get hurt," she adds, and Bonnie knows she is not talking about her health at all.

"I know how to take care of myself," she replies. Her tone is calm and she's not trying to dig up their past. It's just how things are and they need to deal with it if they want to salvage what's left of their worn out relationship.

"Yes," Abby admits, "And I hope you will."

"Don't wait for me," Bonnie says, "I don't think I'll be back for dinner."

The woman sitting on the opposite side of their little kitchen table nods, resignedly.

"Will you be back at all?" she asks, unconsciously holding her breath as she waits for the answer.

"I will," Bonnie reassures her, though she doesn't know how many hours, or days, or months it will take her to get away from her friends, from those that have been her messy family during all those years.

She doesn't need to pack anything, since all her belongings are in a room in the Salvatore boarding house. She just brings along a bottle of water, her medications, money for the gas and her ID. Bonnie tries to be practical, because she's going back home, but in the best of cases she'll find it plagued with murderous, vindictive creatures. She might very well walk into a battlefield and she has not learned to properly control her powers again, yet.

In the case that a villain has taken residence in her town, she hopes they managed to protect each other during her absence, and that they will hold on until she's by their side to fight with them.

She can hardly stick to her driving schedule, too anxious to be back, but she forces herself to because she's a little bit scared of what she'll find when she does.

The long, lonely drive home seems to tickle something inside. Her breath becomes strangely erratic like there's a part of her that instinctively can sense danger, or maybe remembers it. She needs to pull over and calm herself down but she can't. Her breath is labored and her nails sink into her palms, drawing blood, hurting, and she doesn't know why until a creepy giddy voice speaks behind her and she turns with a jerk. But Kai is not there, Kai is _dead_ , and she is not. She is going home. Maybe Damon will offer her his arms to jump into, if he's not gotten himself into trouble while she wasn't around.

She spends long minutes disinfecting the bloody crescent moons carved in her palms and tries her best to patch them up so that they won't smell her blood before she can explain what happened. They must be worried sick, already.

She tries not to attract attention to herself – and though she felt invisible almost her whole life it suddenly seems so hard – so she keeps her head low, wears an unassuming cap she brought, and parks her mom's car in front of her Grams' house. It's been locked for awhile now, and on the patio the vase holders are empty and covered in dust. Her Grams used to spend hours taking care of her plants, hidden under a wide-brimmed hat, slightly shifted to one side, to protect herself from the sun. It was so reassuring for her to come back from her swimming class knowing she would find her sitting on her heals, checking her flowers leaf for leaf, working with her garden tools with one bottle of minted iced tea next to her, it felt predictable and safe and it was really all she needed then. Maybe even now.

She decides to walk to the Salvatore boardinghouse. It will calm her nerves and serve to acquaint herself again with the town. She walks the same path she did when she left after having lunch at her Grams', backpack on both her shoulders – which was so not very cool for Caroline always rolled her eyes at her – and a song in her head; and though many memories are hard, a lot of them are sweet instead, and the feeling is lulling enough that she doesn't notice the number of cars parked along the street, cannot comprehend why the front door of the Salvatore's house is open, or why there's music coming from inside.

Bonnie walks after a couple that is rushing in, stays hidden behind the elegant curtain of guests and the sparkling white of Elena's dress, standing on top of the staircase, catches her eyes effortlessly.

Her thick brown hair is falling straight over her bare shoulders and her eyes are so brilliant. Bonnie thinks happiness must look like that, exactly like that. So fair, in a natural waist organza ball gown, Alencon lace bodice and illusion scooped neckline, an asymmetrical tiered skirt with horsehair trim and chapel train. The details on her dress shine at every little, graceful movement and Bonnie is enchanted as she looks at her friend. She looks like she stepped out of a fairytale, maybe her favorite – Cinderella. Bonnie herself always loved the Little Mermaid.

Then she notices the dark hair of the man waiting for her at the bottom of the stairs, can recognize the pose of him though she can only see his back and his lean shoulders under the black suit jacket. For a moment, her heart seems to inflate inside her chest and threaten to break her rib cage from within with the overwhelming, deliriously happy desire to call out his name, but Damon reaches out his hand as Elena delicately begins descending the stairs and Bonnie can physically feel her heart break in two while a voice in her head asks how could she be so stupid as to let herself hope for something she shouldn't have dared to dream in the first place, why she couldn't manage her own feelings better, why she didn't keep herself in check when she knew all along how things were going to end. She was always just the friend, always just the sidekick, the minor character of the epic love story. Bonnie's name was made for missing person reports and headstones, but Elena's was made for love letters and vows and forevers.

She makes a strangled noise and someone turns in her direction, looking for the source of the intrusive noise. Even Damon turns briefly, his head over his shoulder, with a look of slight panic in the blue eyes that don't seem to find her. She is invisible, in more way than one, and it would be funny if it wasn't so devastating. Her soul seems to suffocate inside her body. She can feel it rebelling briefly and die with a whimper, like an extinguished fire leaving only a faint trail of dark smoke. She cannot control her powers and her shame seems to cover her, hide her in plain sight as the flowers decorating the handrail start losing their petals in a colored rain that makes a carpet for Elena's feet.

There's an awestruck choir of voices and Elena smiles. It lights up her entire face. Bonnie can't find the strength to hate her, for that is the very same reason Bonnie was attracted to her friendship in the first place—the fact that there's always a light shining on her, that she can draw eyes like hearts, that the world turns around her like she's the sun. But Elena's happiness grows at the expenses of Bonnie's misery, and Bonnie cannot breathe, cannot bear to watch Elena's fingertips brush against Damon's palm. She must close her eyes, press the heels of her hands against her ears so she will stop hearing the whispering of joy and the classic guitar playing a familiar song she can't quite name. She must stop herself from crouching down in a ball of aching flesh and shake her head to shake off all those treacherous moments her heart leapt because of one word, one touch, all those moments coming back to her now to try and tell her that it's not happening.

But she knows better. She always knew better.

Bonnie died that day, eleven weeks ago. But Damon began to live again in that very moment. And the only thing she can do for herself is leave. Now, immediately. Before she turns into sea foam.

#

 **One year after the linking spell.**

She barely notices how the mattress of her bed dips under the weight of another body. Bonnie only knows that it's warmer and it feels good, so she adjusts her head on the pillow and pushes herself back.

"Wake up, sleeping witchy," he says, but she has no intention of indulging him. She was having such a good dream. _You think that once we'll leave this bed everything will turn out to be a dream. I'm totally dream-worthy material. The wet kind. But you'll see. I'll show you._ And her heart is melting a bit between the sheets. And though she can't see his face, he makes her feel loved, and that's enough for her to not want to leave him, ever.

"Chop-chop," Damon insists behind her, and her beautiful dream drifts away from her, letting her flow back to reality. For a moment, the two moments—the two men—blend together and her heart drops into her stomach when she hears Damon's voice and she's half terrified.

He props his head on his hand while his elbow sinks into the pillow as he bends over her to stare at her closed lids. "I know you're awake, you can't fool my super-hearing. That's how I know you don't like Enzo half the way you like me."

"That's ridiculous," she says, her eyes opening wide in outrage.

"Maybe, but what does that say about your taste in men?" he insists, his voice irreverent. Bonnie just covers her face with one arm, hoping he won't notice the way his stupidity makes her smile. It took them almost two months to get over the fact that she's dating Enzo, and she's just glad they're all managing to get a balance out of their messy life.

"Damon, what are you doing in my bed, inflating your own ego?" she asks, her voice muffled by her arm, "It's not like you can't do that somewhere else".

"Why, I'm filming our very own home video," he piques.

It takes a moment for the words to sink into her sleepy brain, "What?" she asks, taking her arm away and looking up where Damon's stretched arm is holding a camera.

"Oh God," her first instinct is to withdraw and hide under the duvet, curling up in a fetal position against Damon's clothed stomach. He smells good, like leather, guaiac wood and tonka bean, and under the sheets his scent seems to envelope her whole. But her improvised refuge backfires on her when she hears his moaning voice, "Oh yes, baby, you're almost there, just a bit lower…"

"What the hell, Damon!" Bonnie pulls the covers back in a rush, looking at him with wide eyes and reddened cheeks. He's grinning like the Cheshire Cat and he's pulled back his arm just in time that the camera doesn't end up broken in pieces on the floor of her bedroom. Instead he looks through the lens and points it to her flustered face.

"Stop that, now, I don't know what–"

"Oh, don't be such a prude!" he says, as he grabs her by the shoulder and pulls her back onto the single bed – so little space between them that she's almost kissing his collarbone as they lie tangled together, "I'd get more out of a boarder," he says, moving the camera away so that he can press her against his chest. "Now, smile for the camera," he adds, but she's so stunned that the first whir and click of the camera shutter can barely make her blink as she stares up at his face.

"I know I'm gorgeous, Bon-Bon, but I'm telling you to look at the camera."

"I really don't wanna humor you," she says, turning her eyes away. It's unexpected and scary, not only because one minute ago she was peacefully resting after spending half the night bent over her books, but because when all of Damon's attention is on her she simply doesn't know what to do with herself.

"But you will, so let's pretend you kicked and screamed plenty, and now have caved in to my creepy demands in hope that I'll be satisfied and will leave you alone in this tiny bed to dream about poorly equipped boyfriend that should not be allowed to breathe the same air as you."

Bonnie turns to look at the camera and Damon lets his arms slip under her back. "Enzo is not poorly equipped. In fact, he's–" but he pulls her almost over his chest, effectively shutting her up. It's not like she can say that much about that particular part of Enzo, because they didn't get there, yet. It got hot and heavy between them, lately, but she's still pulling the brake on their relationship. Bonnie is not ready to let go of her reservations and yet he's so eager to let her pull his strings that, even so, it's turning out to be a seduction game between them.

"I just realized we don't have pictures of us, Bestie." He says, "How will anyone believe you when you tell the tales of how good-looking your very own best friend is if you don't have proof to support this undeniable fact?"

"I will point at the asshole that is always stealing fries from my plate at lunch."

He takes one picture after the other, and when she's too embarrassed and decides to escape her own bed, he only follows her around. Stealing a picture as he hugs her from behind, immortalizing her hands as she hides her face behind them, freezing the moment she pulls her hair up into a ponytail as he looks at her through the mirror.

"I don't do that anymore, since you've started eating healthy and shit. All that greenery kind of reminds me of Monet."

"So you want to hook me up on junk food and get rid of me?" she asks jokingly, turning around to watch his face. His expression seems to have sobered up.

"I don't want to talk feelings, here. Once you start, it just catches, like the flu. But to imperishable memory, let it be known that I think I'd only be so lucky if you could live past the very last cockroach." And he tries to make it sound as light as it possibly can, but the smile on his face is not quite right, and she knws he means every word.

"That's…sweet?" she asks, skeptical, chosing the ignore the beat her heart stupidly skips, "And I mean that in a very gruesome kind of way, of course."

He just shrugs and puts the camera down. "So, to let the notion sink into your tiny, overloaded-with-my-sexiness brain, tonight I'll buy you dinner. Something disgustingly healthy that a squirrel would be hesitant to eat. And we'll watch that boring movie–"

"That you love," she cuts in.

"–That I love. And I'll let you win every hand at strip poker."

"We're not going to play strip poker. And I can't have dinner with you because I have a dinner with–"

"You are totally having dinner with me, because otherwise, I'm going to think you're one of those girls that will drop everyone for their stupid boyfriends, whose world and life and mental stability turns around said boyfriend, and I'll be greatly disappointed."

"Fine, whatever," she concedes, rolling her eyes to his drama queen attitude, "But we're not playing strip poker."

"We are _totally_ playing strip poker because I need to support my _poorly equipped_ theory with actual facts." He replies without missing a beat.

"We'll play no poker of any kind," she says, pointing her finger at him like a scolding teacher.

"Fine," he sighs, turning on his heels to disappear behind the door, "Strip monopoly works, too," as Bonnie tries to call after him.

When she comes back from her last lesson she finds an entire wall decorated with pictures of her and Damon. Some of them are bad and blurry but they are all pinned in front of her. Like there's nothing he's ready or willing to throw away about them.

It makes her smile. It makes her stupidly drag a chair in the middle of the room so that she can sit and just stare at them for hours. It just occurs to her that this might be one of his twisted ways to remind Enzo that she's a little more his that she can ever be Enzo's, but that would surpass even Damon's sense territoriality when it comes to his friends. That is something he reserves for Elena and she's not ready to go there. She's not ready to think of her, to compare herself to her where Damon is involved.

Damon is her best friend, and that is all he'll ever be. That is all she's interested in him being.

On the wall, the very first picture, the one in which she was staring at him all flushed and breathless is missing. She never notices.

 _I'm on a fire escape_  
 _Where you said to wait_  
 _And I did, yes I did_  
 _No, I heard the cold winds say:_  
 _"You're a fool to stay"_  
 _But I did, yes I did_

 _Oh, you're not my own_

 _And every word I wanted to sing_  
 _Got replaced with the wedding ring_

 _#_

 **Note:** The song I used at the end of the chapter is "Fire escape" by Matthew Mayfield.


	9. Chapter 9

**Note:** This fanfiction does not diverge from the events that occurred in season 7, ergo Bonnie and Enzo confrontation and Damon's decision to desiccate himself and bamon's lack of a proper goodbye, but the developments work around all of that, as you'll see. Everyone was freaking out over the last chapter that I pushed myself to write this one as fast at I could. For those who don't like bonzo/bonenzo (or whatever that's called) I should warn you there's quite a bit in this chapter, I think it was needed. The song at the end of the chapter is "Leave while I'm not looking" by Paloma Faith.

 **Thirteen weeks after Elena's return (and Bonnie's death)**

Stefan is flipping through the mail as he steps though the front door, left open just one moment before.

From the kitchen he can hear Caroline's voice asking, "Where are my diet chocolate chips cookies?" and he can't help but smile, knowing that she's going to find them put them on a plate and then proceed to ignore them, turning to the box of chocolate she keeps in the bottom of the cabinet deluding herself that moving stuff around to get to it will stop her from trying.

Stefan shakes his head, amused, and keeps flipping through the mail. Bill, bill, bill, junk mail, bill, letter. The letter is addressed to Caroline and he turns the envelope to read the name of the sender but there's none.

"Caroline, there's something for you," he says, walking though the hall with the pile of bills in one hand and the letter in the other.

"Is it dipped in chocolate?" she asks, eyes sparkling as she appears in the doorway of the kitchen and pushes back a strand of wavy blonde hair from her face to look at him better.

Stefan chuckles at her reaction, "No," and kisses her, keeping his busy hands to his sides, "But you're giving me bad ideas," he adds, grinning.

"Am I?" she asks, smiling happily. It's been awhile since she could smile like this and he likes it. "Well, you did say you had something for me, so…" but her purring tone seems to go to waste when he raises one hand to tell her, "I was talking about the mail"

Caroline tries to sulk at the scarce reaction of her boyfriend to her seduction techniques but it barely lasts a moment because she's too curious to see what's inside the letter.

"This must be from the newlywed, finally!" she says, slipping the envelope out of Stefan's fingers, "Can you believe it's been two weeks and they didn't even had the decency to call _once_?" she sounds so genuinely outraged he has to turn away so she doesn't see his amusement.

"They're on their honeymoon, Caroline, I think they're too busy wrapped around each other and being generally ecstatic," he explains while he checks on the electricity bill to keep himself busy.

"Yeah, well, I'm her best friend and I organized the _perfect_ wedding, I deserve some consideration. What's a thirty-minute phone call compared to that?"

"Thirty minutes?" he asks, baffled, but she ignores his question.

Caroline sits on the sofa, cuts the envelope open with a paper knife, and clears her throat to read it out, "Dear Caroline," she says, her brain recognized her writing before she has the time to let the words sink in, and she's too breathless to keep on reading aloud, "How do you write to your best friend to tell her you're not dead? I'm sure you'd have a good opening for this occasion, but I'm at loss. Though, I'm alive, I hope that by now we're established this. I am alive, and I am fine and I am sorry if I disappeared on you. You should know it wasn't intentional." Her hands tremble holding the page with Bonnie's neat writing. Her wondering eyes catch the sight of something half peeking out of the envelope she cut, and when she raises it from her lap Bonnie's picture falls from it.

She looks a bit thinner then she remembers but she's smiling, sitting on a front porch with her mom, wearing a side braid and a new pair of earrings she'd never seen before.

"Oh God," she's breathless, and a trembling happy mess but it's so much to take in and Stefan turns around to see her completely lost.

"Caroline, are you alright?" he asks, sitting next to her and gently cupping her face to make her look at him, "What it is?" he asks, taking the letter from her hand.

He reads the first line once, then again, and his brain gets stuck on it, unable to fully comprehend what that means, unable to go on just to find out that it's only some kind of sick joke. The only thing he can think right now is, "How do we tell Damon?"

"About what?" his brother's voice comes at him while he's walking down the stairs, a book in one hand and a bored expression on his face. "Don't tell me, you found another stain on my Persian rug. I swear, when they come back from their lame honeymoon, I'm going to kill Donovan. If boredom didn't do that already," he says, walking to the drinks cart. "I mean, is Paris still a thing?" he asks grimacing.

He's fine with him being the one that walked her to the altar, considering Jeremy could not be punctual to save his life. Really, that's all fine and dandy with him. But his Persian rug? What kind of sick bastard would deprive him of the joys that only his Persian rug can provide?

"Paris is always a thing," Caroline mutters, eyes watering up as she tries to hold onto the normalcy of the conversation before it goes completely off the rails.

"Tell that to your face, Blondie," Damon says, abandoning the book on the cart and pouring himself a drink. He looks at the glass to admire the color. Very few bourbons lately have that true amber color. The redness is replaced by more of a pale straw-yellow instead, sign that the barrels are being stored upright on palates instead of on their sides in true brick-houses. When a barrel is stored on a palate with its head up, the flavor and color contribution from the barrel head gets lost, as evaporation lowers that liquid away, so he's always skeptical of cleared bourbons. But this is the good stuff.

Damon is about to take a sip when he turns to the pair on the sofa and notices Bonnie's picture on Caroline's lap. It could very well be one of the many pictures in the albums Caroline has catalogued by year, but Abby is in it and it doesn't add up, because Abby has not been around since she was a child, and he does not recognize the property, nor Bonnie's hairstyle and there's something falling from the middle of his chest to the bottom of his stomach, which is odd because nothing has been there – beating or otherwise – since the day Bonnie died.

"What's that?" he asks, eyes open wide moving from the Polaroid to the faces staring at him.

"Listen, Damon–" Stefan starts but he just ignores him, taking the picture from Caroline's lap to find the detail that will tell him it's just an old memory and he's once again holding on to a useless, fickle hope that it did not really happen, that he did not really lose her forever.

"Where did this come from?" he asks, "What do I need to listen to?" he presses him urgently. "What it is that you need to tell me?" His hand wraps around the neck of Stefan mahogany t-shirt, forcing him to stand and face him.

His brother doesn't react to his aggression, only holds his wrists in his hands trying to calm him down with a composed tone, "It's okay, Damon."

"This is about Bonnie, isn't it?" he asks, features contorted in anguish, "Isn't it?" he asks, hands tightening around the material of his brother's shirt.

"Yes," Stefan confirms, while Caroline stands up to tear Damon's hands away from her boyfriend.

"Damon," she says, hands open like she's trying to keep an animal at bay, "You need to calm down and sit. I know this is difficult to take in after all we've been though to process her death but–"

"Is she alive?" he's a pale column of cold flesh and empty eyes, his voice barely a whisper. He can't even look at her while he waits for the words, afraid that she's going to say no, afraid that he's going to see that she is sincere and they found her body somewhere and he'll have to catch up with the inevitable end of it all.

Her first response is to nod, but he's not looking at her and she has to push the word out, "Yes," and it comes out half hysterical, half teary. Caroline presses her lips together, swallowing a sob that's threatening to come out and Damon turns his face towards her to look at her in the eyes.

"Say that again," he says, his tone so tamed, so unlike him she's scared for a moment.

"She is alive," she says again, "Bonnie is alive", while Stefan drops to one knee to take the letter that's fallen on the ground when his brother went for his neck.

Damon takes it with one hand, letting Caroline slip the picture from his other and skims the content rapidly. He can recognize her writing from the shopping list she compiled and essays he double-checked peeking over her shoulder, just for the satisfaction it gave him to have such a brilliant best friend. _You nailed it, of course. That's my girl._ He told her sometimes.

"Dear Caroline," she writes "How do you write to your best friend to tell her you're not dead?" Is she looking for input on how to write to _him_? Because the last time he checked, he was her fucking best friend, and _he_ was the one to pick her up when she was drunk (though it happened just twice and he was the one to get her drunk in the first place). He was the one that spent Sunday evenings watching silly romantic movies that tried to crush his masculinity, and he was the one that beheaded psychos for her sake. "I'm sure you'd have a good opening for this occasion, but I'm at loss. Though, I'm alive, I hope that by now we're established this. I am alive, and I am fine and I am sorry if I disappeared on you, you should know it wasn't intentional." He reads this part over and over again to memorize the little curl on the end of the _e_ every time she writes the words _alive_ and _fine._ "I had an accident and died, but this time around it only took me two minutes to come back. Impressive, huh?" She sounds so off, because Bonnie might be tough but this is way too cheery for someone that took a dirt nap, again. "My mom is with me right now so you don't need to worry about no one checking up on me." Yes, because Abby has such a memorable record for being the thoughtful mother, they can all rest easy now. "I decided to stay away for awhile, enjoy the normal life, and maybe put in a transfer application for North Carolina Central University before the new semester begins; though, it will be a bit of a hassle to explain why I'm not dead anymore. I think this might just be my chance to find some happiness, like you found yours. It doesn't mean I'm never coming back, you know I could never stay away from you for too long." Damon is desperate to find his name in her letter, a shade of sadness that tells him she's missing him, but there's none. "I'll make sure to be there when Matt officially gets promoted," even Donovan gets a mention before he does, "and I'll call you all the time to tell you how I'm doing. I know it's too much to ask to someone living in Mystic Falls, especially when they're living around a Salvatore, but don't get yourself into trouble and remind Stefan that I expect him to be the most perfect boyfriend that ever lived _._ " _Of course_. "I assume Elena has been back for awhile, so I know you two have each other's backs and I don't need to worry too much. In the end everything worked out. Please, tell Elena and Damon I'm happy to know that they found each other again, and that I did not get in the way of their love." Damon chuckles, then starts to laugh like a mad man, using his free hand to rub his face like maybe this is a dream, or a nightmare.

Caroline and Stefan are looking at him like he's lost it, and maybe he did.

"So thoughtful of her," he tells them. "Isn't it thoughtful of her?" he asks with a crazy smile on his pale face. "She didn't want to get in the way of our love," he says mimicking a childish voice. "Well, it's too-fucking -late for that!"

"Damon, this is good news," Stefan tries to say, uselessly.

He reads the last line aloud, "Tell everyone I love them," and it sounds so ridiculous to his ears that he begins to laugh again.

"She has such a sense of humor, this girl!" he says in between laughs. His eyes are bloodshot and they look dangerously like they are brimming with tears while he smiles like the villain of a DC movie.

"You're having such a meltdown, man," Caroline replies miserably. Damon has never been one of her favorite people, or vampires for that matter, but she saw him stick by Bonnie even when he had his chances to put the blame on her. And she saw him look for her when they had all given up. He does not deserve this.

"Me? A meltdown?" he asks, grimacing in a way that makes him look like someone has just stabbed him in the back. Whenever he tries to smile Caroline can see his canines out. "I'm not. I'm totally fine. I mean, I was completely out of my mind thinking about her body rotting in a ditch somewhere but it turns out she was just fine. She just didn't have the time to call me and tell me that she was out there living the American dream!"

"That's not really what the letter–" but he's just not going to listen to her.

"That's great! Well, I do feel a little _pathetic_ now, realizing I've been so busy brooding that I couldn't get it up for my hot girlfriend, whom I practically _dumped_ into someone else's arms, but _hey…_ she was too busy picking a new college to give a fuck about me!"

"You know she cares, Damon," Stefan says, trying to calm him down.

" _Riiight,_ " he agrees. Mockingly. "She says it right here," he begins looking for the exact line where she deigns herself to write his name. " _Please, tell Elena and Damon I'm happy that they found each other again._ See?That's clearly code for _I miss him so much that I want to exterminate the whole population of this damn town_. Oh no, wait," he pauses, pretending he's remembering something, "that was me!" he yells, hitting his chest with a closed fist, black veins tracing his face like flowing rivulets before disappearing again.

"And look at her," he says, walking towards Caroline and taking the picture brusquely from her hand. She has to let it go before it gets torn in two. "I like the hair. Don't you, Care Bear?" he asks, his fingertips brushing over the Polaroid like he's caressing her braid "She's pretty, isn't she, brother?" he asks Stefan, turning the picture so that he'll see it, too, "So pretty you would never guess what a heartless bitch she is!" The curse taste bitter in his mouth. He would have torn off the tongue off of any man who would call her that, and he's doing it himself, now.

It quiets him down – he's far from being calm, but the rage died down like someone kicked him, and kicked him again, while he was on the ground.

"But if she thinks I'm going to let her get away with this, she's got another thing coming," he says, sounding barely alive. "If I need to take a wild guess, I'd say she's in North Carolina, and if she believes I'm not going to turn the whole state upside down to find her she better think again."

He slips the picture in his pocket and takes the stairs two steps at a time. He's a vampire with a mission, once again.

"We need to stop him," Caroline hisses between her teeth turning towards Stefan, "He'll do something stupid!"

"That's a given," Stefan says, placing his hands on her shoulders to stop her from going after his brother, "But he won't hurt her. You know he won't. They have to work this out one way or the other." He's not even finished speaking when Damon rushes down the stairs, only his leather jacket on and the keys of his Camaro closed into his fist.

"You don't even know where to find her!" Caroline protests as he walks past her.

"I can rule out the morgues, it seems," he shrugs placidly, looking again like the asshole of a playboy she remembers, just slightly more on the edge.

"But I do." She says, making him freeze at the front door. "I recognized the house. It's an old property of their family. They went there for vacation every year before her mom left," she explains, barely believing what she's doing, "I know where to find her."

Damon turns around, slowly. He cocks his head to the side fixing his eyes on her. The sharp movement of his neck looks like the twitch of a crow, scrutinizing her.

"And will you tell me?" he asks.

#

 **Thirteen months after the linking spell.**

Enzo shows up to her dorm room with a picnic basket and a red rose, looking so handsomely rough that she doesn't think she's going to stop him this time around.

Bonnie keeps him at the door for a moment, making a show of thinking it over like she's really considering leaving him out. One of the girls that lives two doors over walks past him to go to a party, and she turns around to steal a glance at his ass.

Bonnie keeps her impassible façade and he never lets his eyes move away from her, but still he grins. "She knows that you're missing out if you don't let me in, love," he says, his accent alluding to all the nice tricks he can do with a twist of his tongue.

"How did you–" but she stops herself, rolling her eyes in annoyance. Vampires. "Never mind," she says, stepping aside, "Come on in."

She shakes her head at finding herself managing another unstable, self-centered creature who happens to be more decent than she initially thought, despite his bad record. Bonnie turns around to speak. "I wasn't e–" But he kisses her. It's just a peck but his face stays close as he says, "Hi," a breath away from her lips and it feels very tender, and very welcome.

"I just got back," she says, trying to hush his ardor, "I really need a shower."

"Yes," he nods, "That's my answer to your invitation."

Bonnie crosses her arms under her breasts but doesn't try to put any space between them, amused by his shameless flirting.

"It wasn't an invitation," she says.

"You're being shy," he admonishes her.

"You're being a jerk" she replies, not missing a beat.

"That's how you like me."

"You really spent too much time with Damon," she says, shaking her head.

"Damon does not have the exclusive on charming jerkiness," he clarifies, cocking his head to the side in a fluid movement, "Nor does he have it on you," he adds, circling her back with his arms. The basket he brought falls against her ass, making her inadvertently press her lap against his.

"I'll let him know that you think he's charming," she jokes in a low voice while playing with the buttons of his jacket.

"I'll let him know that you are mine," he says before kissing her. He's pretty good at that, so good that she realizes what is truly happening only when she opens her eyes to see the ceiling of her room.

"The caveman attitude does not work with me," she says, turning her head to the side like it's turning her off when in fact it is not. It's not that she feels the urge to be claimed like in one of those ridiculous romance novels Caroline used to pass her under the beach umbrella during summer Sundays spent at the public swimming pool, where the disheveled man on the cover is always painted into a pose of dominion and control that never reflects on the buttons of his shirt, and the woman is always presented as the scared little creature ruined by her own allure and innocence. What she likes is the idea of belonging, of being part of something bigger than she is, of being needed the way she needs.

"Okay," he concedes, "You can be the caveman, then. Works fine with me," he admits candidly, "I'll go around with a shirt that says _If lost, return to Bonnie Bennett,_ " and while he says it, his eyes are completely honest, and there's no trace of embarrassment on his "I will rock it". It makes her laugh, and it makes her feel braver. It makes her fingers grip his tighter, like she's finally found a firm ground on which to stand, something that will not let her doubt her place or self worth.

She thought love for her would be a constant, fiery burn, something that exploded in your face at any moment or warmed you up from the very bottom of your soul until you're made of nothing but light; but this kind of love, born from Enzo's stubbornness in not letting her go, from the accidental falling of walls in moments where they were too vulnerable or maybe just too much themselves, is not bad at all.

And she wants him. She wants the rough, scratching feeling of his jeans against her tights and the way his accent seems to do some touching of its own whenever he speaks to her. She wants his mouth and his need filling her own.

She wants him, but maybe the universe is not of the same idea because when she opens her eyes, under the work of his plump mouth against the curve of her neck she can see the pictures staring at her from the wall, and can hear her cellphone ringing. And though it's impossible, it seems like the sound is more insistent though she hasn't changed the ring.

"Enzo, I have to take this," she says, half regretful of her own words. Why can't they leave her alone long enough to let her have a fulfilling sex life? Or a life in general? She's been trying so hard, and it's been working so well. She really doesn't want to stop this.

"I agree, you have to take this," he says, cupping the back of her neck to kiss her again and rub himself against her warmth. Bonnie giggles against his mouth but her cellphone stops and then starts again, and it's her clue that the world is ending again, someone is being tortured to death or the Grim Reaper can't find his scythe and wants to know if she's seen it somewhere.

"Oh fuck," Enzo groans, half frustrated, half resigned. He feels her body stiffen under his and doesn't need to hear the words. She knows he won't resent her for this. He didn't resent her even when she chopped his hands off. Enzo hides his face in the crook of her neck, inhales deeply, then pulls himself away, making her regret the loss of him.

Her phone is on the dresser and she's a little bit dizzy from all the blood rushing, but she sounds all business when she answers Stefan's call.

"Did you hear from Damon?" he asks, sounding tense.

"No, I didn't, why? Something the matter?" she asks, wary.

"Didn't he try to talk to you? At all?" he asks again, frustrated, "Of course he didn't," he adds, like it makes sense. Damon tells her everything, and by everything she means _everything_. Sometimes she feels like it's too much, like she knows him so well, has him so engraved inside that when Enzo touches her she fears he might feel Damon too, so it's hard to understand what he means.

"Am I supposed to kick his ass?" she asks, trying to assume a lighter tone, but there's a crawling fear that's following the line of her spine to the bottom of her soul. Stefan doesn't answer and she looks back at Enzo. He's sitting on her bed, his palms are pressed on her mattress and his stretched fingers touch something. He looks at the piece of paper peeking out from under the pillow and he grabs it before raising his eyes to her.

"I'll call you back," she says in a breath, closing the conversation.

Enzo stands from the bed, walks to her to hand her the letter and kisses her on the head. "Call me, too," before leaving her alone, like he knows she needs to be.

It's not like she expects a suicide note, but she fears something is going to die after she's read the letter and she's not sure she's ready for it. Maybe she's being paranoid, she tries telling herself. Damon always tells her everything, she would know if there was something bad going on.

The letter begins with "Bonnie," not _Witchy_ , _Judgy_ , _Bon-Bon_ or _Bestie_ like all the notes he leaves for her, and she stops breathing and puts down the letter to calm herself down.

"You know what they say about some problems, that you'll see them differently after a good night of sleep? Well, you'll think that I'm taking this to another level, and I am, because I'm me, but I think I must do this, for the sake of those I love. As you know it's not a very long list. You are on top of it."

Panic grips her throat so hard she can't even swallow as her mind works around the meaning of his words.

"I feel myself slipping, bit by bit, into someone that can't be true to his word. One of these days I will say or do something from which none of us will be able to come back and you'll know that I am no–"

Bonnie puts down the letter again, hands trembling and eyes brimming with tears. The asshole thinks she's going to let him do a tirade about whatever he's getting at when all this boils down to is his way of telling her that she is not a reason good enough to stay. And she won't let him wax poetic about the fact that he's leaving her behind like anyone else. _Yes Bonnie, I will kill a psycho for you but don't ask me to be conscious while you're around because that is really taking it too far._ She folds the letter and puts it back inside the envelope. She's going to _die_ before she gives him the satisfaction.

She knows where the bastard is. He is where his heart was all along, and her own followed around a hollow shell. Whenever she touched him, accidentally or otherwise, she should have felt Elena in there, too.

Bonnie knows where the bastard is, and she's going to tell him what she really thinks.

 _Have some mercy_  
 _You hurt me more than you know_  
 _So if you go_  
 _Leave while I'm not looking_  
 _Do it fast,_ _Oh please don't kill me slow_  
 _Leave while I'm not looking_  
 _Go silently_  
 _So my heart won't know_  
 _Leave while I'm not looking_


	10. Chapter 10

Nags Head is a little town in Dare County with a population of barely three thousand people that comes to life during the long summers, making it a busy vacation spot due to its beaches and the sand dunes of Jockey's Ridge.

Bonnie must have spent more than a few afternoons on the beach because her dark skin has taken on more of a bronzed gold. Damon can see it clearly though the light is dying. She's wearing a pair of fitted high-waist shorts that look a bit retro and a coral cami top with spaghetti straps, one of which keeps falling off her right shoulder, making her carry her grocery bag with her left hand. He can tell the weight of it is cutting off her blood circulation from the way she keeps on moving it from one hand to the other every now and again.

The little pain implies she's alive to feel it, so Damon feels no urge to go and help her. It's been awhile since he saw her, saw the way her steps seem to become a little dance when her mind drifts away, the way she pushes the hair back from her face when it tickles her.

His steps are soundless, and it's easy for him to blend in with the shadows creeping around, but when he sees her turn her gaze over her shoulder he grins at her intuitive nature. Still, she can't catch him. Damon walks, mimicking her pace, and it feels almost like walking with her the way they did when they used to go grocery shopping on the Other Side. She always came back for him, back then. But this time she didn't. This time she sent a lousy letter, didn't even take the trouble to learn how he was managing without her and supplied a picture to show just how wonderful she was without his shit to clean up after. Some part of his rational mind knows that the smile was not a laugh at his expense, some sort of subliminal message to twist the knife into his insides, but he is bleeding all the same without her, so it does not change a thing.

"Don't you miss me?" he whispers, watching her back as she walks ahead of him. Almost like she heard him, Bonnie slows down, looks over her shoulder again before a male voice calls to her. The boy jogs to her, offering to carry her bag. She politely refuses but he insists, taking it from her hand, which she massages, as he takes on walking at her side.

He doesn't like the boy, doesn't like the way he looks at her, doesn't like that she smiles up at him, and can't guess if the silence between them is companionable or just awkward. He can hear her laugh at a joke he made, and it doesn't have the same inflection it had with him, so he can't help but wonder if that's the kind of laugh Enzo could entice from her when she hit her head and decided to go for that loser. Damon thinks it actually sounds just a little bit empty, just a little bit sad, but that's probably him imagining what he wants to see, only it doesn't look like she's going to knock his teeth out and tell him how she belongs to another.

When they reach her house he doesn't stop at the picket fence but follows her onto the steps and inside the front door like he's been there many times before. Is the boy the reason why she suddenly wants to make a normal life for herself in another state? Damon slips his hands inside the pockets of his jeans, his fingers brushing the Polaroid tucked within, and forces himself to take a breath and lean back against a wall, waiting patiently for the boy to leave.

#

Her mother's insinuations about her attraction to Nathan are a whisper under the voice of her own reason; and sadly, both of them agree on the point. The look he sports today, with the temperature rising constantly in the last week, is different, but she can still see the obnoxious way he behaves, if only to hide his shyness, and she knows what attracted her to him.

The same way she knows now, with such painful, humiliating clarity, what it is that attracted her to Enzo. And she'd like to hide; hide from the choices she made in the last four years, from herself and the perfect face she sees whenever she dreams at night.

"You seem troubled," he says, peeking at her as he takes the two steps of the porch.

Bonnie pushes the front door open, shakes her head to deny it, "No, I'm just tired," and doesn't look him in the eye as she holds for him. Truth is, she had some ties to cut and it hurt. Enzo did not take seeing her return from the dead only to break things off with him very well. What she had to offer was not what he wanted, so they broke it off cleanly, holding nothing in their hands.

"You're alone?" he asks, looking around before following her into the kitchen.

"Mmm-hmm," she murmurs. Everything is neat and practical, like every vacation house, and he watches her as she puts away the groceries.

"I could keep you company," he suggests, slipping his hands inside the pockets of his pants. She raises her eyes, and though she's not really surprised by his proposal, she's not ready for her own. There's a little part of her, a very desperate little part, that wants to say yes, throw herself into whatever this might be – a one night stand or a four-year relationship in which she'll tell herself how happy she is and how he's the only one – but she's done this before and she has no idea where to start and pick up the pieces of herself. And then there's another one, one that wants to retract into a corner and tell him not to touch her, because she can't bear the idea of being touched by anyone. If he does, if someone does, she'll bruise and bleed and break and cry.

"Thanks, but I'd just rather eat something and go to sleep," she explains with a tight smile, letting the fridge close on its own.

"Maybe we could go swimming tomorrow?" he proposes casually. "I have a boat. We can roast in the sun and be in peace off the coast." Damon would have thrown out a passing comment about rubbing the sun cream on her back. She almost smiles thinking of the impertinent sound of his voice.

Nathan can't play the part to the end because he cares too much what other people think of him.

His tone is different, a little bit remiss, like the first refusal was an unexpected rejection that wounded him more than he let on. She can read him easily and it makes her feel both sad and guilty.

"I don't think we should," she replies softly, adjusting the strap of her top.

"Why not? I like you," he protests, "and I thought you liked me." Did she lead him on? He flirted with her and made her feel pretty when she didn't know anything about herself but what she saw in the eyes of those around her, but he didn't seem serious about her. She was really just the new girl in town, the only one that he still hadn't made fall at his feet. Remembering her life made her grow distant, more indifferent, if not cynical about her taste in men, and it drew him closer.

He's a good guy that mistook the thrill of the challenge with the sting of love. Bonnie knows the difference now.

"There's hardly a girl in town that doesn't, is there?" she asks, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear, "But summer flings are not my thing."

"Maybe that's not what I want from you," he presses, sounding a little bit hopeful, and maybe a little bit scared, too.

"You don't really mean that and I'm okay with it," she explains quietly. She fears that raising her voice would make the walls inside tremble and awaken the pain that has her numb. "I'm just… getting over someone, and I need time on my own, you know."

"I get it," he says, but she doesn't believe he does. She actually envies that of him. "But if you decide otherwise I might be of help with that," he suggests, with his flirty grin in place. "You know where to find me."

Bonnie giggles and nods, "I do."

She doesn't accompany him to the door. She barely rummages through what she just brought to decide what she's going to cook for herself – probably nothing, because her stomach is full already, mostly of the memories she's swallowed down, everyone one of them resurfacing through her consciousness – when she hears the front door opening and closing again.

"Nathan?" she calls. "Did you forget something?" she asks without turning, trying not to sound tired. She'll make herself an herbal infusion, she decides, opening one cabinet to look for the dried pomegranate flowers. She can hear the sound of his footsteps but he doesn't say a word, so she puts the small jar on the shelf and turns towards him.

For a moment she thinks it's a trick of her mind and her heart breaks. Then she realizes that it's not and it only feels worse because Damon stands there as an existing reminder of that part of her she misses, that part that makes her drag herself around like there's a limb missing.

"Damon," she whispers, her breath shallow as she tries to compose herself, to freeze her face into a mask that won't give away the state she's in. She's so happy. She's so _fucking_ happy, and she shouldn't be because he does not really care about her, not enough, not as much as she does for him. He's happy on his own, he's happy because of Elena and she'll _die_ a thousand deaths before she'll let him see the effect he has on her – the way her legs can't stay steady, the way her heart is beating out of her chest, the way she can't look away from his annoying, handsome face, from that shade of blue that's sinking into her very soul until it becomes the color of every breath she'll ever take.

Bonnie wants to ask whether the warmth of his body pressed to her side while watching movies on his bed is something her mind invented or if it was as real as it seems in the moments her thoughts slip away from her. "What are you doing here?" she asks instead. "If you need help, I'm sorry but I haven't got control of my powers back just yet, so you'll have to ask somewhere else," she says, trying to rationalize his presence in her home.

Damon looks stunned, but her words seem to sober him up quickly. They drip inside his brain like dew falling from a leaf, snapping him out of it.

"I was worried you'd crinkle my shirt jumping into my arms. What luck that you can actually hold yourself back," he says with an sardonic grin that does not warm his eyes.

Oh, she wants to do that, to wrap herself around him and feel his arms trapping her, his hands pressing her against his chest for just a short century or so until she can peel herself away, but she can't. She must tear him away from her heart, like a band-aid on a bleeding cut, so she crosses her arms under her breast to shield herself from his familiarity, to keep from crumbling under his gaze.

"I just came to check on you," he explains, his jaw set. He can hardly be offended by the fact she thinks he came to her for help. She's his Plan A half the time they're in trouble. And she's Plan B the other half. But the implication rubs him the wrong way. "And see the appeal of this boring, little town," he says, grimacing as he looks around the house. "Or was the kid the appeal of it?" he asks pointing his thumb over his shoulder, eyes wide in mocking wonder. "What did you call him? Armand? Is he the reason why Enzo vanished into thin air?"

"Nathan," she replies. "He's not a kid, and what–"

" _Not interested_ ," he interrupts her in bad grace, but she's not about to protest, because if he doesn't linger on Nathan, he won't notice nor guess the resemblance that attracted her to him at the beginning, and he won't connect the dots to discover why Enzo's gall was so endearing to her. And she won't be humiliated on top of heartbroken. "I thought you needed a ride back home so here I am," he offers with a tense smile.

He can feel her resistance like an invisible wall, but he'll be damned if he won't break it down. She really doesn't get it, he thinks, her power – not the one that makes his brain bleed down from his nose, no, not that one.

"I'm staying here," she says, stark, looking away from him. From where he stands, Damon can barely see the green of her eyes hidden by the fan of her lashes with the sun disappeared behind a dark cloud putting the earth in a stifling blackness. "I'm happy here," she insists.

"And you plan to take out a mortgage, and live the American dream, don't you?" he asks, irritated. "That's why there's more furniture in a crypt than in this house."

"So what?" she asks unnerved, fearing this is what she's been really waiting for, for him to come and drag her away and lie to her about her place being next to him on a bed while they watch a stupid movie together and she can feel his warmth. "I like the minimalist style!"

"You like dreamcatchers hanging from every window, and the house smelling like someone just said the freaking _mass_!" he yells, unable to understand why she's being so stubborn about this, why she wouldn't want to come back – though the list of losses and troubles she gained since she met him should be a hint.

"I'm happy here!" she yells back a lie.

"Too bad, then, because I won't leave you alone!" he cries out, his face contorted in a grimace. "You think you have a right to be happy after all the crap you've put me through?" he asks. "I've been searching every fucking hole to find your body! I barely got any sleep–"

"Oh, I bet," she mutters. He's told her so many times how he had planned to spend his time once Elena was back. She's sure he followed the program to the tiniest detail.

"I've been way more balanced when I had my humanity off. And all of this because you didn't have the time to let me know that you weren't actually rotting somewhere–"

"I had an accident!" she protests, feeling insulted he'd think her so egoist on purpose.

"And you broke all your ten fingers and couldn't remember my phone number?" he yells.

"Yes! Exactly!" she's fuming, too, by now, "I lost my memories and I wish I didn't get them back at all!" she screams.

She has that power, he thinks again. Her voice comes out and the ground breaks apart and somewhere a continent is disappearing under water. Other people might be unaware of it, but he knows better. She is everything, and everything is falling away from him.

"Everyone goes on! Everyone can be happy without me, so why can't I? Huh?" she asks, almost trembling in her frustration. "Why should I always be stuck in the same damn place, wanting something I can never have?" she demands, "But you can't stand it when the world doesn't revolve around you!" she accuses him, "And right when my life can finally be about me, you show up and ruin everything!"

She's out of breath and the moment she stops holding on to her rage she's going to cry, and she really can't. Not in front of Damon. Damon who is sad, and looks a bit like she's just ripped his heart out of his chest and it's attached to the rest of him by the last vein.

"I thought we were friends," he says. His voice sounds unsure, all his rage seeming to have abandoned him.

She won. Bonnie won this confrontation. She's proud, happy even…really, truly. It hurts so much she wants to die.

"Yeah, we were," she says, trying to sound impassible. "At some point. But things have changed," she says, "I suppose I still owe you a congratulatory gift, though," she adds with a shrug, "I'll pick something and I'll send it over."

She's so cold, so distant it's probably winter on this side of the planet. When he drags himself out of her house, away from the life she wants so much that has no space for him, he'll probably find a blanket of snow outside.

Still her words make so poor sense his brain latches onto it, stupidly.

"Congratulatory gift?" he hears himself asking.

"For your wedding," she explains, "I'm sure Elena was lovely in white. I don't suppose you saved a slice of cake for me, did you?"

"Wedding?" he asks again. Something is not right here. There's a piece he's missing in all of this and it spurs his mind into action, spurs his anger. She's being too sure about this for someone who's just guessing. And he remembers the sharp feeling in the middle of his chest, the petals falling under Elena's feet while she descended the steps towards him, waiting at the foot of the stairs. He remembers looking around all fucking day, waiting for Bonnie to show up in a pretty dress demanding a dance they could never have.

"Whenever we spoke about our weddings, we always said we'd be each other's maids of honor, but I guess it was only Caroline," she says, her voice has an sardonic quality about it.

"You guess or you were there?" his voice takes a slight shrill. She's far too gone to care about it.

"I wasn't dressed for the occasion…" she just explains.

"You were there and you couldn't bother to tell me?" he asks, barely holding it together.

"I didn't want to steal the spotlight on your special day," she says, shrugging it off.

" _Matt's._ "

"What?" she asks, confused and oblivious.

"Matt's special day," Damon explains. His gums itch while he thinks this torture could've ended two weeks ago but she decided against it. Maybe he's rubbed off on her and she likes the smell of blood, now. Of _his_ blood.

"I don't understand," she says, shaking her head.

He can see the wheels turning in her head but she doesn't catch the meaning of it, because it's too absurd to her that he's not gone and jumped the broom with Elena when he had the chance.

"Right?" he asks, "I don't understand it either," he says, almost laughing. "The girl I was waiting for comes back from her life-long nap, wants nothing more than for me to fuck her into the mattress but I can't get it up because I'm too sad about the fact that the girl I _thought_ to be my best friend died." he explains in a pressing, feverish tone. His lips curve into a sinister grin as he stares at her breasts, where her heart should be. Does she even need one to know where to hit and hurt the most? "I didn't even care about her. All I cared about was stocking up on some fucking scented candles that smelled like you."

"No," she says, unable to let herself believe. "No, that's not–" but he really doesn't care about what she has to say. He's heard enough and now it's her turn.

"I did my best to be her loyal dog, wait around for her without letting my feelings for you get out of hand. I've put myself to _sleep_ for years and it didn't work," he says, his voice too light to not sound scary, "I couldn't get rid of you… so now, tell me Bon-Bon," her nickname on his bitter tongue feels threatening, "Why should I let you get rid of me?" he asks, taking a step towards her, and then another.

"It's was Elena," she says, trying to get hold of her panic as she takes a step back by reflex. "It was always Elena."

"Yes, it was," he says, his canines slipping out as he grins at her, and suddenly she's pressed against a wall and she can see black veins around his eyes, feel his breath hitting her mouth, "Until it _wasn't,_ " and he's kissing her, hard, trying to break a resistance that's made only of stupor.

She has this power, he thinks, to make things alive with her mere touch. A volcano woke because of her.

She doesn't really care that he's angry. She doesn't really care that his teeth are on the verge of tearing apart the tender flesh of her mouth. She doesn't care that his chest is so hard she can't breathe as he crushes her to the wall. Her brain latches on slowly but surely to his words, to what they mean, and her arms hook around his shoulders, her tongue pushes into his mouth, and she gives as much as she gets and suddenly his mouth is very human and so good that's she could cry.

"You're a stone-cold bitch," he accuses against her lips while his hands sink into her hair, tone so _tender_ she doesn't even mind the insult. Her heart is so full it could burst any moment.

"Damon," she breathes.

"You want to get rid of me?" he asks, his lap pressing into her stomach, letting her feel his growing hardness, "Let's see what you can do," he says, tongue sinking into her mouth to kiss her deep and slow as one hand ungracefully pulls down the strap of her top that kept falling off her shoulder during the afternoon, baring the supple flesh of her breast.

His caress is harsh, possessive and her moan is almost pained. Some part of him is wondering if he's hurting her, because her eyes are wet and yet she is not actively trying to push him away. She's not trying at all.

"Did you miss me?" he asks, the blood pumping south makes him half suicidal and he pinches her nipple with his fingers trying to share the pain with her. His heart is bare and if her feelings aren't, at least her body needs to be.

Bonnie moans her "Yes". Her top rips so easily and she barely offers any resistance. Her eyes are clouded with desire and he can smell her scent. Not the incense of her candles, or the smell of her soft hair, but the scent of her sex, getting wet _for him_.

"I thought of you all the time," he says. Damon pulls at the button of her shorts, her hips follow the forceful movement of his hand and she swallows her breath. "Tell me you thought of me, too," he demands, his hands slipping inside her shorts, under the thin fabric of her panties, but only ghosts on her sex. There's a tingling sensation spreading all over her skin, from the ends of her hair to the tip of her toes.

The lace of her thong tickles the back of his hand and one fingertip finds the trace of her arousal.

"Not that stupid kid, not Enzo," he says, his anger is trying to bubble up again but desperation has taken over now. "Tell me you thought about me."

Her slender fingers grip at his shoulder, her hips move trying to make his finger pass the confines of her femininity. "I did," she moans, words stumbling out of her, "I thought about you. Every day. Every day."

He uses the back of his hand to push her shorts down. Her sex is covered with a ginger crochet-lace thong panty and he kisses her mouth to stop his brain from going into overload. She makes a delicious sound and her hands pull him closer instead of pushing him away. In the back of his mind there's a scared voice that tells him to do this right, to make her come mercilessly so that she won't be able to push him away. Not tonight, anyway.

One finger slips into her, trying her sweet wetness and meeting little resistance. Her flesh takes him eagerly. She's tender, and warm, and his brain is getting squeezed inside his skull. There's an insistent pulsing against the zipper of his jeans, but she's naked and beautiful and wet. And she's there. He can ignore himself for awhile.

Long enough to drag his slick finger slowly halfway out, and then drive it in again. His hand is trapped there by the lace of her thong and there's not a chance in hell he can complain about that.

Bonnie bites at her lower lip and two more fingers push inside her. She's tight but she's wet more than enough, and she says, "Yes," purrs it so nicely he could hear it all day long and not get tired of it.

Damon kisses her mouth keeping the rhythm of his hand steady as he tries to use the other one to work the button of his jeans.

"I'm hard for you," he says, bent so that his forehead presses against hers, "Always was hard for you," he says, while her eyes look up at him. "We used to fall asleep together, and your body… so close… made me go insane," his pumping fingers take a new rhythm and her mouth falls open. "Your smell lingered between my sheets and I woke up hard in the middle of the night wishing you would come into my room and put me out of my misery, one way or the other."

"Please," she moans, feeling his hardness pulsating against her stomach. Her fingertips graze at it before he pins them up against the wall.

"I'm an asshole, Bonnie," he says, slowing down the sweet motion of his talented fingers just when she was reaching her high. She tries to force her thighs shut to keep his hand there, force his fingers up inside her, but it's useless. "I'll make your world revolve around me, because mine revolves around you and it's only fair, do you understand?"

She can only nod and make an "Uh-huh" sound in response, like her brain can't properly function because his fingers found the strings of her thoughts and pulled at them while he worked her up.

"It's only fair, Bonnie," he says, pulling his hand away from her sex to suck his fingers dry as he holds her gaze. "It's only right," he repeats, using his hand to drive his hardness where she needs it, and not quite.

Damon teases her with it, traces the outer lips with its thick head, massaging the outside of her.

"Don't you agree?" he asks, scattering kisses against her temple and forehead as she tries to push herself down on him. Her hands grip at his shirt, pulling, and he looks at her face, cheeks flushed with desire.

"You can try," she says, eyes daring, trying to spite him for tormenting her so. Bonnie wants him so much she can feel the emptiness of not having him inside gnawing at her.

"I think I will do that" he says, reaching down to hook his hands behind her knees and pull them up. It's a fluid motion, he pulls her up like she weights nothing, her legs wrap around him in a way that's very familiar and yet not. Bonnie's fingers grip the back of his neck, scratching the skin with short nails, her eyes are set on his while he pulls her down, and when he parts her and penetrates her, it's tight and warm and wet and glorious.

Her back arches and she tries to uses her tiny hands on his shoulders for leverage.

"I think I'll try, Bonnie," he says, hands gripping her hips to pull her up and then down again. He keeps her there as he looks up. Her face is leaning close to his. She looks almost angelic, despite the pain she's given him, despite it all. The locks of her hair fall against his nose, he can smell the summery scent of it, can see the days she's spent without him. Maybe with Nathan. And he needs to be deeper into her core.

"Damon," she moans, her voice dripping with want and pleasure. He knows she's not thinking of anyone else but him and he'll keep it that way. He takes a step, pressing her against the wall, spreading her knees enough for him to take her as deep as possible.

Damon buries himself into her, between the softness of her walls, basking in the delicious squeeze of her body and hiding his face in the crook of her neck so he can let the feeling have its way with his sanity.

Damon can feel her legs hook up higher on his hips, hear the soft panting of her breath against his ear, her hands slipping up under the shirt he's still wearing. His muscles are tense and the fabric provides a delicious, yet frustrating friction against her breast.

Bonnie winds her hips as he thrusts in and out of her, enjoying his almost aggressive assault on her sex. This is how _hard_ he missed her. It makes her soul happy, knowing that. "I thought you had forgotten about me." It makes her body greedy, to have him inside. "I thought you didn't want me." She confesses against his ear, and her core tries grip at his aching length to keep him there, to never lose him.

Damon pulls his head back in surprise, her words hitting him so hard he loses his tempo for a short moment, but he recovers quickly. He can't help but search her face while his hips thrust inside her with an unrelenting force, causing her to shut her eyes to take in the sensation of him. This singular moment gave meaning to the torture of the last months. This singular moment told him they are truly together in this.

His burning gaze refuses to leave her face and Bonnie finds the perfect shade of blue when she has the strength to open her eyes again.

It's like he's trying to tell her all the things he can't find words for. She can feel them all inside, filling her to the hilt.

The intensity of him is going to make her come undone. She can't last much longer, she knows, and she's ready to welcome the end. Wishing they can start again.

When Damon feels the quivering of Bonnie's wall begin, he grounds himself into her faster as he kisses her face reverently, enjoying the spasm of her sex until it's so impossibly tights he slows the vigorous force of his thrusts. Her body massages his hardness and he must squeeze his eyes shut to fight off the end.

Not yet, it can't end, yet. He wants this to last as long as possible.

And he manages to not climax, only welcomes the rush of her sweet release, waiting out the throbbing of her sex so that he can pick his pace again. She holds to him as she can, though the pleasure left her limbs weak. Bonnie counts on him to take care of her, and he does. His arms are around her as he's driving up inside her, thrusting sweetly, and then furiously so, until she's with him again on the peak of it all.

Bonnie comes again, and he follows.

It's her power, Damon thinks, as he holds her tight and breathes hard against the skin of her shoulder. She opens herself up and it's forgiveness of all sins. And world peace. And it's them.


	11. the end

If it's all been a dream she won't be sad about it, _she won't_ , Bonnie decides though her heart trembles inside her ribcage; but, maybe she can fall asleep again. Maybe she can reach Damon there, have his love for a few minutes more so that her life will be more bearable.

She's lost so much already, torn away so brutally. Can't she just have a few minutes more? Just a few? She prays, shutting her eyes tight, wishing drowsiness could cover her like a blanket gently rolled over her body, but she's more and more awake with every second passing, and she can feel the shifting of the bed as Damon drags himself behind her and props his head up, making his elbow sink into the pillow for support. His hand rests gently on her hip, over the pastel sheet of her bed and she's not sure she can remember how to breathe properly.

He lowers his head to brush his nose along her hairline and she can feel his mouth stretch into a smile against her skin before he hides his face in the crook of her neck to breathe her in. The touch of his eyelash seems to tickle her heart. His arm hooks tightly around her, effectively trapping her between his lean chest and the mattress.

"Good morning, Bon-Bon," Damon mutters against her skin, and this time the ticking makes her squirm and giggle.

She's so embarrassingly happy she bites her lower lip as she answer with her own, almost timid "Good morning."

He moves only to make her roll under him so that he can look into her eyes as she lay on her back. Their bodies fit together so perfectly, making her finally grasp what it was everyone always talked about, about the one person that _completes_ you. She thought it was an embellished line for romance novels, but inside her tiny bed, with Damon looking into her eyes and his now undemanding body relishing in the pleasure of their naked skin pressed together, she learns that it's not. There's a complacent smile on his pink lips and she gives in to the temptation to sink her fingers into his hair and pull it back from his forehead. It's longer compared to the last time they were together.

"Haircuts are too mundane of a thing for you?" she asks, ruffling them tenderly.

Damon's smile falters and they're too close for her to believe it a trick of her mind, but it passes quickly and he smiles at her again, with a sort of melancholy that would make her fall in love with him if she wasn't already.

"Why cut my hair?" he asks, on top of her, "You weren't there to see how handsome I was," he adds before kissing her. The touch of his tongue is brief, the kiss is short, but it feels like a rock hitting the surface of the water, over and over again, producing rings that become waves over her soul.

"I never meant to leave you," she says, pushing aside any hesitancy, letting her hands cup his face. She knows he needs to hear it.

"That's good to hear," he says, softly, "And speaking of that," he starts with a lively tone, a playful smile already on his mouth, "Is Abby going to show up and kick me out of the house naked? Because I'm telling you, your neighbors will love every second of it."

"Don't think so," she says, rolling her eyes at his vanity.

"Wanna try and see?" he asks.

"Not really," she replies, patiently. "I meant to say that my mom is not around anymore."

"She left, _again_?" his voice take on an irked note, sounding almost shrill. Bonnie expects him to launch a tirade about how unreliable she is, and how she shouldn't have trusted her in the first place, so she tries to soothe his rage immediately.

"I told her to," she rushes to say, "She's not used to live in the same place for long, and I could see it was becoming frustrating for her," she explains. "Things are better between us now. Being together healed a few wounds for the both of us, but there are things we can never get back," she adds, "I accepted that."

"My wise Bonnie," he whispers, taking a peek at her frowning mouth before he looks into her eyes again, "You're too good to be mad at her, but I'm not… I'm childish and petty; so, if you don't mind, I'll stay mad at her for what she did to you."

"She really t–"

But he doesn't want to hear it, so he kisses her; because now, he can shut her up with kisses, so she'll probably never get to say another word again. His fingers pinch her side making her squirm and scream under him. Bonnie laughs, pushing him away and trying to escape him but Damon just grabs her easily by the sides again and drags her back on the bed, spooning her and kissing her shoulder.

She's a bit sore from their lovemaking, and she feels like her coma ended much later then the doctor told her, because now every cell of her body is awake and ready to take on the world. Or stay in their own, the one they can make between the walls of this half empty house that she hopes has enough room to fit his whole ego.

"Damon, I'm hungry," she says, recognizing the first signs of her stomach demanding food.

"That's what I wanted to hear…" he groans happily.

"I'm _really_ hungry," she states, not letting him distract her.

"For my sinful mouth?" he asks dramatically, "Say yes."

"Yeees…" she drags the word, trying to let him down gently. "That too, but mostly for breakfast," she says, patting the back of his hand in a consolatory manner.

He sighs in resignation and lets her slip away from his arms to stand from the bed. Damon bends one arm behind his head, admiring her naked body standing in the violet daylight that seeps through from the thin curtains of her bedroom. Bonnie bends to pick up his t-shirt and it's so large for her petite body that she wears it like a mini-dress, but her clothes are abandoned on the floor of the kitchen and she knows he won't mind. She pulls at the neck of the black shirt, nonchalantly sniffing the fabric to smell it, recognizing the scent of his skin, the milky sandalwood and the black pepper lingering on it – she must cover her silly smile with the fingers that are still grasping the dark cotton.

"You look really good wearing my clothes," he says, relaxed against her pillow, his sex barely covered by the messy sheets.

Bonnie turns her head over her shoulders, looking at him and yet still unable to let the notion sink in without a slight sense panic – that the moment she trusts that it's true she's going to wake up to a broken heart.

"Thank you."

"I mean, if I can't have you constantly naked this is the _one_ look I wouldn't mind you adopting," he decides, grinning up at her before throwing away the sheets and standing from the bed.

Bonnie is not used to this, yet, to the intimacy of him naked – though he was never shy around her before – and so close, but it feels right. It feels like the natural progression of their long, awkward, rated XXX for the extreme sass, relationship. So maybe they should have see this coming, maybe a few years ago, when her heart could hurt at something stupid like him not remembering how she takes her coffee, or maybe when she needed boundaries and space because he was messing with all of them and she couldn't remember why she was not allowed to when everyone was assuming they were a couple, or maybe when he got angry at her for letting Alaric hurt her, or that time he decapitated Kai without a blink and carried her away from destruction. Maybe she should have seen it when she woke up to him sitting with his back against the wall, asleep next to her on her bed, guarding her from sadness and loneliness of an empty world.

Or maybe that first time he wondered if he could raise her chance at surviving her suicidal plan, dancing with her to Pearl Jam and trying hard to look unfazed by her fate.

Damon's hand slips around her sides and he holds her tenderly, bending to kiss her forehead. The height difference between them is larger while she's barefoot and she has to pull her head back to look up, but he doesn't seem to mind that he needs to slouch to reach her mouth and kiss her lips.

He only wears his jeans without bothering with underwear or shoes, and when she goes to retrieve the mail she comes back to find him on the porch waiting for her with two cups of coffee. He hands her one before lowering himself to sit on the first step. Bonnie sits next to him, leaning against his side, legs tucked to the side, pulling at the fabric of the shirt to cover herself as best she can.

She breathes in the smell of hot coffee, blowing on it lightly before taking a tentative sip. It burns the tip of her tongue a little so she just looks at the dark liquid, while wondering aloud, "Why could you never remember how I like my coffee?"

"What?" he asks, surprised, turning his head to look down at her. Bonnie is not looking at him. Her head is resting against his shoulder and every now and against she blows over her coffee.

"I got so mad whenever you got it wrong," she recalls, feeling a little stupid because it stills bothers her to think he cared so little. But love is not in the grand gestures, she learns, but in the little acts of gentleness. Love is in the stocked up candles, in his handwriting adding Greek yogurt to the shopping list though he hates it. It's in the blanket in which she finds herself cocooned in the morning, though she kicked it off during the night.

"Don't I know?" he asks, taking a sip, "You got so angry you'd think I just killed your entire family, when actually I just killed your mom, _once_ ," he jokes.

"Idiot," she mutters with no resentment, putting down her coffee next to the abandoned mail. "I mean it. Do I mean so little you can't waste some space in that brain of yours to remember something so stupid as the way I take my coffee?"

Damon can tell it actually hurts her a little, but he's been so insecure himself, so many times, he can't really blame her for the way she feels about something so apparently irrelevant.

"I know exactly how you take your coffee," he says, making her pull away and look up at him.

"You don–"

"I know how you _take_ your coffee," he insists, cutting her denial short. "You go for latte macchiato in the morning, and Americano after lunch," he states easily, so like a good student that learned his lesson long ago, "But it's not how you _like_ it," he adds, surprising her. "You take a latte macchiato because you think it's breakfast appropriate, and you take Americano in the afternoon because you think it will help you to stay concentrated on your books or whatever else you need to do, but you always steel a glance to the bottle of caramel syrup or the whipped cream or the ice cream toppings, so I know that you go for healthy because you think it's the better option when you want something else entirely."

Bonnie wants to contradict him, tell him he's saying things just to cover the fact that he doesn't really know her, but the fact is that it does make sense, and it's true. She didn't realize what she did until he told her. Latte macchiato is boring and Americano is just not her thing.

All this time he knew her better then she knew herself.

"I'm just grateful I've been reminded many times how unhealthy and difficult I am," he says, breaking her thoughts, "because someone like you, that only makes the reasonable choice, wouldn't let me touch you with a stick unless it was what you really wanted."

"You've made some shitty choices, Damon," she agrees, "Bordering on toxic, actually," she adds, "But you're healthy for me." She watches him look both unprepared and amazed at that. "You made me stand up for myself, and even when we'd fight I knew you would look out for me. You've put a damper on my constant anxiety to kill myself for the sake of someone else and when that car hit me, my heart started to beat again because of you," she explains, trying to work around the knot in her throat, trying not to lower her eyes so that he will see this is the whole truth, and nothing else, "Because you said you'd only be so lucky if I could live past the very last cockroach," she admits with glossy eyes.

"I've never been the healthy choice for anyone in my existence, _ever_." Damon reflects aloud, sounding proud, as he holds up her chin, watching the mouth that made him happy as it smiles timidly. His fingers stretch and the tips brush lightly over her upper lips before leaning in for a kiss. He's careful not to break the contact as he lets the hand that holds his cup of coffee slip through them so that he can encircle her and press her closer against him so that she won't tremble from the chill, but only from their kiss.

Later, he slips inside the shower stall behind her just to help her wash her hair, and when he's done he rests his chin on the top of her head and holds her by the shoulders while the water washes over them both.

They make the bed together and he prepares lunch asking for ingredients with an open hand and the tone of a doctor asking for surgical instruments. He ignores the phone in his back pocket until she tries to pick it with the hands wet from washing the dishes. "I know you have a thing for my ass," he says, turning around and putting the phone out of her reach, "But I feel uncomfortable with your fondling. I mean, where's the romance? The courting? I want to feel _special_ ," he protests with a pout that makes her smile.

"Oh, but you _are_ special to me," she plays along, "It's just that you're so _hot_ , babe, how can I keep my hands to myself?"

"I bet you say that to all the girls," he grins, putting down the plate he was drying off to slip one hand behind her neck and pull her towards him for a kiss. She stands on tiptoes, balancing herself against his firm chest.

"Someone is calling you," she reminds him against his mouth at the end of the kiss.

"I know. I've been selected for Mr. Universe. But you know me, I'm so _shy,_ " making her laugh. Damon easily picks her up by the waist and turns around to pull her up onto the kitchen counter. He squeezes himself between her legs, enjoying the way they fit together but making no move to take off their clothes or entice her into having sex with him. Oh, he wants her, he wants her really bad, but it's been so long since they talked, since they just joked around, enjoying the simple luxury of breathing the same air and looking into each other's eyes. _Fuck_ , he's becoming a sissy, he thinks, but then Bonnie smiles _brilliantly_ and he really doesn't care _that_ much.

Now he gets why Stefan was so eager to have a picket fence and all that shit.

"I can't wait to have some boring sex with you," he thinks, aloud, making Bonnie blink down and her smile disappear from her face.

"What did you say?" she asks, while he's still smiling blissfully. "So, sex with me is boring?" she tries to stay calm, not react like a crazy, insecure woman, but it's hard when you're the little, fragile human and the man you love has been with a list of insane, adventurous probably sex-crazed women. "I'm _so_ sorry you had to endure that!" She tries to push him away so she can get down from the counter top.

"No, no, Bon, that's not what I meant!" he tries to stop her, fingers intertwined while he tries and block her with his whole body. "Stop, Bon." She really can't get away from him if he stands between her legs unless she wants to end up with them being even closer than they were in the first place.

"So, what did you mean?" she asks, clearly annoyed at how his words can affect her, "Because it didn't really sound like you were happy with… what I can give you."

"Do I look unhappy to you?" he asks with a smile. His eyes are sky-blue and looking at her like she's _everything_ , so she falters. Her tone is tentative when she says, "Not really."

"That must be because I have everything I want," he says, pushing a strand of hair behind her ear, "Which in case it escaped your attention, is _you_ ," he adds, "I want to live with you, share the house chores and try to spice up our sex life when in about forty or fifty years the novelty of having me in your bed will start to wear off. Every few years, there will come a period where I make you so crazy that you'll slip into control-mode and you'll start to unconsciously plan our sex life," he nods like he just _knows_ , and kisses her nose to explain, "but I'll welcome you home _in the nude_ and ruin your perfectly sound schedule," he tells her, sounding like he looks forward to it. "I can't wait for that to happen. For habits to kick in and for us to change together," he adds, kissing her mouth while she looks at him incredulous.

"It sounds like you've really given some thought to this," she tries to say while he pulls at her lower lip with his teeth.

"So?" he asks, before cupping her face in his hands, "Don't like my plan?" he asks, not giving her a chance to answer. His mouth kisses hers, and then drives along the curve of her jaw and her down to her neck.

"Yeah, but when…" It's really hard to concentrate when he's doing such nice things with his tongue, and she can barely speak without moaning. "Ah-… when did you…"

Damon seemed to have mercy on her, for he pulls away and looks at her, "When the girl you love-" he stops abruptly, realizing what he's said. It can't be such a big revelation, after last night, he supposes. Bonnie is silent but he knows that she's slightly panicking inside. He can tell from the way her eyes move and search his own. "When the girl you love decides to drop dead and disappear, you kind of find some free time to think about all the things you should have done," he explains, looking at her, grateful that she is alive and well and with him, "Like admitting the truth to yourself, for starters. Like telling her you hate her boyfriend and any other man she lets kiss her because that's something you only should do, that it's hard to be with her and remember all the boundaries and the lines not to cross, so it's only because you're constantly about to slip up that you go away sometimes. That you should have a future together, a long one."

"Is that why you seemed to like Alaric better?" she asks, trying not to frown as she remembers the times she would have liked him to stay but he didn't.

"As you proved firsthand, I do have a weakness for my best friend," he reasons, "but Alaric can't hold a candle to you," he reassures her. "You on the other hand, fell for Enzo. _Enzo._ " he repeats, grimacing in disgust. "He's a conceited jerk that overplays his accent and believes every woman is supposed to fall at his feet."

"I have a type," she admits, making him squeeze his eyes.

" _What_?"

"Minus the accent," she adds, "I think he reminded me of you."

Damon looks wary, slightly confused, and, "I feel flattered… and insulted," he decides. "That must have been really hard for him to find out," he says, sounding thoughtful. "Did he _cry_?" he asks, with a sudden 360° switch, "Did you take pictures of it?" he presses, thrilled like a kid that's just received an unexpected present.

Bonnie is astonished at his reaction, "You're so _mean_ " she accuses him, half shocked, half amused.

"Didn't you _notice_?" he sneers, "I snapped the neck of your first boyfriend, how many times?" he asks, unable to even remember, "You wanna talk about the others?" He shakes his head, rethinking it. "No actually, let's not talk about them. Those I didn't kill, I only spared them because I knew they would die on their own, eventually, _soon_." He adds, "I only went easy on Enzo because he seemed to make you happy, and I couldn't."

"Because of Elena," she finishes in his place.

"Because of Elena," he confirms, "But now she's happy with Matt." He smiles at the weight that's been lifted away from him and kisses her again. Just like that, the dots seem to connect on their own and she remembers the song playing at the wedding. Elena kept her listening to it on repeat the summer she and Matt shared their first kiss.

"So, all that's left for us to do," he says, against her mouth, "is discover how you really like your coffee."

They go to the nearest place – Front Porch Cafè. It's attached to one of those paint-your-own-pottery places. It has its own bakery and the pastries smell heavenly. Bonnie indulges in some apple turnovers while Damon orders every coffee on the menu to the waitress' dismay.

Between all the different tastes and the different scents she's disgusted halfway through them but he insists that it is _vital_ for her to taste them all. It takes them hours because she pauses for at least ten minutes between each sip of coffee to let the flavor rest on her tongue and speak to Damon about whatever crosses her mind. The owner doesn't seem to mind at all, and one waitress looks their way with an endeared expression.

When he pays, it's a ridiculous sum, of course, but her attention is taken by a piece of glossy paper. The corner of it pops up from a compartment of his leather wallet. They leave with no favorite coffee, though he says they'll try again, and suspicion of an upcoming stomachache.

By the end of the afternoon she's craving something very healthy to take away all that sugar from her mouth, but Damon ends up volunteering for the job, kissing her in the street like any normal couple during a hot summer day.

Mrs. Cosgrove, her neighbor, is gardening when they walk back home and pulls back her head to look up at them from under the visor of her panama hat, noticing their intertwined fingers.

"I see how you managed to resist the Benson boy," she comments with a knowing smile.

"The guy with no sense of self-preservation?" he asks, turning towards Bonnie.

"Hi, Mrs. Cosgrove," she greets the woman without paying attention to him, "This is my…best friend–"

" _Slash_ boyfriend," he corrects her without letting her finish. It's just so strange to call him otherwise, though it's a good kind of strange.

"Damon Salvatore," he adds "In case you didn't hear her scream my name the other night," making the smile on the elderly woman fall off her face.

Bonnie sucks between her teeth, utterly embarrassed, "Damon!" and she turns towards her neighbor. "He just came this morning," she tries to tell her.

" _That_ I did" he adds, playing with the double meaning of the words. And she kicks him in the shin, giving him a threatening look.

"Yeah, I arrived this morning," he says, "I was just joking," he adds. "I get a kick out of embarrassing Bonnie." The _literal_ kind of kick, he'd like to add.

"And human beings in general," Bonnie adds between her teeth while she tries to offer a polite smile.

"Well, mission accomplished," the woman confirms, uncomfortably shifting on her knees and trying to hide her eyes from Damon. Bonnie knows that they'll become the talk of the neighborhood by tomorrow.

"We have to go and prepare dinner," she says, grabbing Damon's hand to drag him along. He's not particularly recalcitrant. "It was nice seeing you, Mrs. Cosgrove."

"You too, dear," the woman answers, keeping her eyes on them as they walk inside the fence and through the front door.

"Was it really necessary?" she asks once they are inside. She can still feel her cheeks warm from the utter embarrassment but Damon just shrugs.

"You know how it is, Bon, when you're in love you want everyone to know," he justifies himself way too candidly, placing a kiss on top of her head and walking to the kitchen, leaving her behind.

"Yeah, well, not in _detail,_ " she says, following him.

"Don't be greedy. Joy must be shared," he reprimands her, like a parent telling their child to share their toys. It's really not the same, but he'll play the fool just to get on her nerves, so she calms down immediately and grins.

"You're right," she says, gaining a smile. "I'll go and share the joy with Nathan. Maybe I can even give him _some_ of it," she adds turning around and marching to the door. She can barely feel the gush of wind before she sees him leaning with his back on the door, arms crossed over his lean chest.

"Alright, let's call a truce." He concedes, raising his hands in surrender.

"I don't know if I want to," she says, sounding grave, but then proceeds to lean against his chest, reaching up to link her arms behind his neck.

Damon bends and hooks one arm behind her knees, pulling her up easily. "I have a few arguments that could convince you."

"You think?" she asks, faking ignorance.

"You underestimate my dialectic," he informs her, "You should know I can run my tongue for noble causes."

"Like shocking old women?" she asks, acting like she's unaware of his intentions. It's really hard to do that once he sits her on the table and pulls up the hem of her sundress. The cream fabric with a floral print falls on the pavement of the kitchen, leaving her naked save for a pair of white lace panties and Damon's hands on her breasts while he concentrates his attention on kissing her properly.

He does that like he's searching for all the secrets she can't share yet while his fingers squeeze the soft flesh gently. She almost forgets she's naked on her kitchen table – _almost_ – until his mouth doesn't. It starts driving south along the curve of her neck and shoulder before capturing a nipple between his teeth, trapping it gently before closing his lips to suck.

Bonnie's fingers sink into his black hair while she looks down at him. This is something she has dreamed about against her own will. This is something she has wanted though she believed it would never happen. But Damon is here, and he makes her burn.

His open hand slides over her stomach, and down, down, where she's wet already. His fingers rub her over the fabric and the touch clouds her head with raw desire. She's forced to shut her eyes to keep her thighs from trembling. She's panting and throbbing, and he's teasing her mercilessly.

"Damon," she calls him, "Damon, p-please," she calls louder, and she can feel the stretching of his smile against her skin. The _jackass_ is doing it on purpose.

"I swear," she says, panting, "If you're trying to–" but he pulls aside the fabric of her panties and one finger sinks inside her. She groans in sweet relief and bites her lower lip, letting go of the breath she was holding. Bonnie arches her back when he pushes another finger inside, then another.

"I'm just using my arguments, here," he defends himself with an innocent tone that does not suit him or the things he's doing her. Bonnie has no desire to discuss it right now, nor any lucidity to do so. She just rests her weight on the heels of her hands, throws back her head and enjoys his care. When he stops, it's only to take off her wet panties and suddenly she's laying on her back, arching up at the touch of his tongue traveling along her slit, her legs hooked over his shoulders. It's a sudden, sweet assault –two fingers pushed inside of her, pumping her damp depths and the flicks the tip his tongue against her sensitive, swollen clit making her unable to control the writhing of her body on the hard table. She doesn't want to grab his hair but she can't help herself. She's grinding herself against his capable mouth, urging him to use his tongue more vigorously against her, and his name tumbles from her plump lips like it was trapped deep inside until now. Her mouth is dry and the rest of her is on fire, and when he asks, in his raspy voice, "Are you convinced, Bonnie?" his breath hits her cunt, adding to the pleasure. Bonnie presses the heels of her hands over her eyes, trying not to laugh at the overdose of sensations, ending up only whimpering, unable to hold back the intense pleasure surging through her. His thrusting digits keep on working her as her walls start to clamp down around them. Damon doesn't stop, he keeps on pumping, and licking, and sucking, and caressing every inch of her wet sex. He's voracious and dedicated and his face doesn't move from between her legs until she's coming again.

When her shattered brain seems to start working again he's kissing the inside of her thigh, looking up at her with a smug grin. Oh, hell, maybe it would have been better if he wasn't this _good_ at it.

"Well," he says, cleaning a corner of his mouth with a finger, only to bring the tip to his mouth and suck her essence off of it, "My dinner tasted _amazing,_ " he tells her, helping her up and inside her pretty flowery dress. "What do you say I feed _you_ , now?" he asks, turning to head to the stove. But she reaches out and grabs him by his t-shirt, pulling him back, hugging him from behind.

"Later," she murmurs against his back, "I say, _later."_

He's happy, not about the fact that he's about to have the hot squeezing of her around his aching length – well, not _only_ because of that – but because this is as easy between them as their friendship was. Because she wants him and she is not ashamed of it.

Dinner can wait.

When he starts preparing their food it's past ten and she's under the shower, so it comes as a surprise when he tells her, "Caroline called;" maybe, because they both were glad to forget there is a whole world outside their own little one.

"What did she say?" she asks, brushing her wet hair with her fingers, sitting at the table as he cuts the vegetables.

"Mostly yelled at me for not answering before," he explains with a shrug. "She was scared she would need to come here for the identification of the bodies. She asked when we'll be there. I told her probably tomorrow night. She's going to be a _pain_ to get rid of, I'm telling you," sounding annoyed that he'll have to share her time.

"I don't think I want to," she says, calm and hard.

"You don't want to get rid of her?" he asks, oblivious to the meaning of her words. He turns around, slapping a rag over his shoulder. "I know she's your friend but can she do for you what _I_ can?" he asks with a promising grin.

"No, I meant that I don't want to go back, Damon," she clarifies for him, "I'll stay here".

"What?" he asks, taking off the rag from his shoulder and putting down the knife.

"It's nice, I like it," she just says, shrugging it off like that.

"Am I welcome?" he asks, trying to contain the rage that threatens to bubble up, "Or it was all fun and games but you'd rather give a chance to Roland?"

"Nathan," she corrects him with a smile.

" _Whatever_ ," he replies, "I'll read it on his headstone."

"Damon, don't be absurd," she says, standing up from her chair to walk to him and take his face in her hands. He holds one against his cheek, tightly, but only a bit too tight, "I want to be with you."

"Because you love me," he suggests.

"Because I love you… so damn much," she admits, stating it clearly for them both to hear it, "But I–" she can't finish her sentence.

"Okay," he stamps a kiss on her lips and turns around to keep on cooking.

"What?" she asks, dazed, "That's it? _Okay_?"

"Yeah, of course," he shrugs, "I don't give a fuck about what Caroline wants, or what my brother needs, or if the world is about to end. Until then, I've got my woman to feed and keep happy," but he stops, and turns his head to look at her. "Will you be happy having me be naked all the time? Because I have no clothes so it's either me earning my part, working as art model, or we better go shopping tomorrow."

Damon will do whatever it takes to be with her. The concept is still hard to grasp. Whenever she tries to, it seems to fall away from her like it's made of sand. If she asks him to die for her he'd probably hand her the knife and smile. And maybe even then she would have a hard time believing, because she's never had a thing in her life that was for her alone, never had anyone that wanted to stay.

Enzo was as desperate for someone to love him as she was, and maybe at some point he had fallen for her, but there were places of her heart where there was no space for anybody to stay.

He dries her hair, mostly plays with it. When they go to bed, it's easy to fit inside each other's arms. Damon kisses her lazily and she scratches the skin on his back with short fingernails that do not harm him. And they touch and caress and maybe they'll fall asleep only to wake up in the middle of the night and make love; or maybe they won't, but that's okay, too. They can have their own world, their own way.

In the morning she's cocooned in the warmth of his arms, happy about the simple fact that when she opens her eyes he'll be there, still. Damon kisses her ear, speaks against it softly with his usual edge of cockiness. "I know what you think," he says, "You think that once we leave this bed everything will turn out to be a dream. I'm totally dream-worthy material. The wet kind. But you'll see. I'll show you."

It takes her a long moment to recognize the words, but they come back to her and she can't breathe.

"If you really want to stay here, we can redecorate, or burn the house down and build it again the way you like, better. We can take out a mortgage, make a few debts to feel more normal, buy a minivan. I'm open to any possibility," he says, "But if you think that going back will change anything between us, then let's go back. Because if you don't trust me… if you don't trust yourself, we'll never be happy," he says. "Well," he adds lightly, " _I_ will, because I'll have you and everything else can fuck off. But you won't be happy, and your happiness is my job now. See my point?"

"What about Elena?" she asks hesitantly.

"What about her?" he asks back, feigning ignorance.

"She was your epic love." The words sound so embarrassingly trite and yet insurmountable to her. "You wanted to become a better man for her."

"That's true," he says with a sigh. "I wanted to become a better man but I could never meet the bar. She had to bend her morals for me, lie to her friends for me, but she loved me all the same, even though it dragged her down," he tells her, like a bedtime story. "Change of scene: Enter the Witch. This judgy, annoying little thing that fights with me for the shopping cart and has the _audacity_ to say my pancakes suck. Can you believe it?" he asks, sounding outraged.

"If I try _really_ hard," she replies, "But clearly, something must have been wrong with her," she jokes.

"I agree. So wrong that after I told her every excruciating detail of every single bad thing I ever did in my existence she still thought of me as her best friend. It was _liberating_. She never asked me to change. Never asked me to become a better man." He explains, pausing only to hold her tighter, "I feel like a better man when I'm with you. What's more epic then that?"

She lets the words sink in and it's _liberating_.

When he wakes up, hours later, he finds her with a pile of white sheets in her arms.

"What are you doing?" he asks her, rubbing away the sleep from his eyes with one hand.

"If we leave, we need to cover the furniture," she explains, with her smile hidden behind the pile. "You know, because of the dust."

#

It's almost a kidnapping, the way Caroline holds to her and never lets her out of her sight. She's speaks non-stop and smiles a lot and Damon leaves them to their chatting to unpack her things upstairs. When she manages to get a break from her overwhelming happiness, Stefan is almost timid in approaching her.

"Thanks for coming back," he says, like she just did him a huge favor. It sounds a bit odd, until he adds, "I've gotten used to having a brother. I wasn't ready to miss him."

"He left for a couple of days," she replies, surprised by his reaction to such a short absence.

"Not really," he says, shaking his head. "He's been barely there for three months. The best part of him was with you, all the rest… it could hardly vegetate. He was learning to fake it, for my sake, I suppose."

The way he says it, it's so natural, honest, so matter of fact that she feels bad, gets worried in retrospect, because the Damon she knows always kicks and screams. He can never surrender to anything, and her heart breaks a little for him.

She wants to go to him immediately but when she tries she finds him in the sitting room with a glass in his hand and Elena in front of him. Only when her friend spots her and rushes to her does she notice Matt, too. Matt and his boyish smile, and his golden ring.

They can't even speak to each other. There's too many people, too many questions – there's only one thing no one asks, like they've known that for a long time – and when they leave Damon is already upstairs. She'd seen him speak with Elena a few times, but she never fell away from his eyes.

Her clothes are not in her bedroom, and it's easy to guess where they might be. Damon is under the shower when she enters his room. She can hear the sound of the water hitting the tiles and she lays on the bed, on her side. She's had a side of the bed for years. Maybe that should have given her a hint, she thinks with a smile.

His clothes are abandoned on a chair and the wallet falls down from a pocket. She stands to pick it up and put it back but a glossy piece of paper comes out from a compartment and she decides to take a peek. She can't even recognize it. It looks way older than it is because it was carried alone and picked up and stared at so many times the colors on the corners, where Damon fingers held it, are fading.

It's a picture of them in her dorm room bed. She's on her side looking up at him with large eyes, like an adoring kid.

"I need a new one," he says, startling her. She presses a hand over her heart to calm it down, and turns to look at him. He's ruffling his wet hair, walking towards her with a towel dangerously hanging from his lean hips.

"I didn't mean to scare you," he says, kissing her forehead, then her mouth.

"I kind of sneaked in," she says, "I couldn't find my things."

"They're all here," he says, "Your clothes, your books, _me_."

"Subtle."

"Thanks," he says, before leaning down to kiss her. His skin is wet and his arms leave a humid trace on her clothes.

"So, you want me to share your room?" Bonnie asks tentatively.

"You don't want to?" he asks back, "Wanna keep the thrill and have me sneak into your room in the dark?" he jokes.

"I just… don't wanna rush things. I mean," she says, clearing her voice, "I'm ready for you, if you are ready for me." And it's not even scary anymore.

Damon smiles down at her. His eyes are sky-blue. "You know how long I've been waiting for you?"

 _I knew I loved you then_  
 _But you'd never know_  
 _'Cause I played it cool when I was scared of letting go_  
 _I knew I needed you_  
 _But I never showed_  
 _But I wanna stay with you_  
 _Until we're grey and old_  
 _Just say you won't let go_  
 _Just say you won't let go_

 _The end_

 **Note:** As my usual, I'm not satisfied with what I wrote, but I did try. This is my little alternative to the finale that TVD will give everyone tonight. I'm probalby not done with bamon just yet, so I'll see you in the reviews of my next story. Hopefully soon. I love you all. Stay strong.

 **Note 2:** The song at the end of this chapter is " _Say you won't let go"_ by James Arthur. As leni18 (you're _so_ great, girl) noticed Nags Head is a real place, as it is the Cafè I mentioned in this last chapter (I like putting real things in my stories, it gives me the feeling of making it a bit more real).

Please, if this story gave you even the tiniest bit of happiness let me know. I'll wait in a corner for your reviews. See you soon.


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